


the girl with the modern face

by isozyme



Series: this is love in the modern way [1]
Category: The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Claustrophobia, Closet Politics, Crossdressing, Genderfuck Tony Stark, Identity Porn, Internalized Homophobia, Lingerie, M/M, Pining, Secret Identity, Superheroes In Drag, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-05 16:40:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16371266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: “Nice to meet you.  I’m Steve Rogers,” Steve said, sticking his hand out and trying to wrestle the interaction back into something normal.“I know, sweetheart,” Tony said, ignoring his hand.  “Rescue told me all about you.”“Did you make her?” Steve asked.  It had been implied that Tony was a tech-man, and she said he was her boss.  It would fit together.“Yes, the armor, that was me; she’s my bodyguard,” Tony said archly.  “Impressed?”The only good thing about the future is Tony Stark's bodyguard, Rescue.  She's beautiful in her red and gold armor, and Steve will never know who she is.





	the girl with the modern face

**Author's Note:**

> This is a big mashup of Avengers MCU, 616 and Ultimates canon. (All the things I like, none of the cancer or Hank Pym.) No knowledge of comics should be required to read this fic; I personally know just enough about comics canon to get into trouble.
> 
> This AU pulls a couple of plot points from 616, namely: Tony’s identity is hidden from everyone, and he’s secretly wearing the arc-reactor powered chest plate of the armor at all times to keep his heart going. Everyone is living in the New York mansion, but the Avengers lineup is approximately the same as in MCU, minus Bruce. Characterization is a healthy mix of MCU and Ultimates. (EDIT: in the wake of comments, I have to admit that Tony and Steve are closer to 100% Ultimates. FYI.)
> 
> Title from [Latter Days by Mother Mother.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_FXPL-axiU)
> 
> For additional content warnings, see the end notes.

Steve wakes to the deep, bone-shaking thrum of an engine.  He panics, no, no, the plane didn’t go down after all, he has to make the decision again, and it was so cold when he hit the water, he doesn’t know if he can do the right thing a second time, not now that he knows what it feels like to die.

He’s still cold.  There’s something off about the sound of the plane, a rhythmic groan and snap, and Steve realizes that no — he’s on a ship.  So they’ve captured him, that’s fine, he can fight his way out of a Nazi craft.  He’s done it before.  Steve tries to slow his breathing, keeping his eyes shut, taking in his surroundings more carefully.  His uniform is still on, wet and clinging and — he flexes his fingers — they haven’t taken his shield.  That doesn’t make any sense, why wouldn’t they disarm him?

Steve can hear the breathing and shifts of cloth that betray three, maybe four others in the room with him.

Something beeps, and a woman’s voice, distorted like static over a radio says, “Oh, will you look at that, biosensors say our big hero’s awake.”

So much for surprise.  Steve pushes all his fear and confusion down and lets the icy cool of battle-clarity fall over him.  His fingers burn as he unwraps them from the shield.  He hopes there isn’t frostbite; he doesn’t want to find out if the serum can regrow lost digits.  In one smooth motion he braces to rise —

And metal hands lock onto his shoulders, pushing him back flat.  Steve opens his eyes properly to see his opponent.

It’s an android, gleaming in red and gold, the metal sleek and elegant.  She — it’s obviously a she, from the curves — looks down at him from narrow glowing slits in her helmet, and when Steve struggles again she gives him a shake and pushes harder.  Her metal hands are warm, almost hot at the center of her palms, and Steve goes limp, accepting that he needs a better strategy.

“Okay baby, we’ve got you, calm down, we’re friends,” the android says, her voice warm under the crackle.  Steve would object to the pet name, but she’s not condescending, just soothing, like she’s talking to a skittish horse.

When she’s satisfied he’s not going to leap off the cot he’s laying on, the android backs off.  Without the shine of red and gold metal blocking his field of vision, Steve can see the rest of the occupants in the room.  There’s a man with shoulder-length blonde hair, wearing a cape of all things, a lady in skin-tight black and a lot of guns, and the now-familiar robot-woman.

“Let’s try some introductions,” says the woman in the catsuit.  “I’m Natasha, this is Thor,” she gestures to the man, “and you’ve become acquainted with Rescue.”

Rescue inclines her head.  Thor nods and says gravely, “Well met, warrior.”

“Tell me where I am,” Steve grinds out.  They’d half-lulled him into acquiescence from the pure oddness of it all, but he has to stay vigilant.  He rolls off the cot and stands on burning legs.  The feeling’s coming back and it’s not pleasant.

Rescue starts forward to grab him again, but Natasha holds her back with a hand on her shoulder.  “I think he’ll feel more comfortable on his own footing.”

“How did you find me?”

Rescue explains, “Well, some dumbasses built an oil rig that’s completely inaccessible unless you can fly in gale force winds.  Then, surprise, it caught on fire, because that’s what oil rigs do, and we got called in.  We’re on a crab fishing boat that happened to be nearby.  You’re just our little miracle who bobbed up in the center of an iceberg while we were on our way home.”

“An oil rig in the ocean?” Steve asks, deeply confused.  These are very strange Nazis, even for Hydra, if that’s what they are.  And he _still_ has his shield.  They should have taken it away from him.

“Shit,” Rescue swears quietly.  “They didn’t have those in the forties?”

“Rescue, you’re blowing it,” Natasha whispers.

“This is hard!  I don’t know fuck-all about World War II.  I thought, you know, bilge of a fishing boat can’t have changed that much but apparently —“

“You should rest, Captain,” Thor says loudly.  “You had a long sleep, but not a peaceful one.  My father has always found the waking painful.”

Of course they know who he is.  Delightful.  He should be glad he’s not dead and yet — this is so confusing.  He thought he was going to be _done_.

“It’s good to have you back, Cap.  Welcome to the Avengers,” Rescue says, almost to herself, and then they do leave him alone, and everything is so _strange_ that he doesn’t even try to bash down the door, just steadies himself against the cot and tries to re-learn how to breathe.

***

Steve is in the future.  He’s in the future, and he hates it.

The thing he hates most about the future is Tony Stark.

Tony is richer than should be allowed; he spends his money like it’s endless, on booze, and women, and, apparently, superheroes.  He flirts with everyone, even men, and as soon as he discovers that it makes Steve uncomfortable, he does it _more._ Somehow he draws “darling” out into three syllables.

He looks at everyone like they’re a feast laid out just for him.  Steve feels like he’s being undressed under Tony’s gaze every time he gets one of those slow once-overs, the way Tony’s eyes go half-lidded, veiled by his long lashes.

Steve thinks Tony might wear _mascara_ , like — like he’s a — Steve prefers not to think about it.

The worst of it, though, is that Tony won’t touch anyone, like he’s allowed to look however he wants to but he’s above anyone else getting close to him.

Meeting Tony was…memorable.  They’d landed in New York (wrong, the city was wrong, and that’s when he’d finally believed that it was the future) and Thor and Natasha had zipped off to debrief, while Rescue took Steve to somewhere she called the Mansion.  Steve could hear the capital letter in her voice, and wanted to laugh.

So far, Rescue was the best thing about the future.

Rescue deposited Steve in the foyer and left him with a short apology.

“Sorry, gotta go rouse the boss.  Tony Stark.  This is his place; he’ll want to meet you, make you feel welcome.”

“Okay,” Steve said, wishing he had more on than his torn-up uniform pants and a bright orange rain slicker generously donated by one of the more broad-shouldered fishermen from the ship.  He was tired of meeting people in the future already.

“Fair warning,” Rescue added, already hovering in the air, ready to take off, “Stark is an asshole.”

Steve stood in the ostentatious foyer, hands clasped behind his back, and tried to take it in.  There was a twisting wooden staircase leading to a second floor landing, and above that a grand chandelier.  Steve shifted his weight from foot to foot.  His boots were, somehow, still wet.

When he got too antsy to be still any longer, Steve drifted over to the far end of the room and examined the paintings on the wall.  Asshole or not, Stark had decent taste.  Not just impressionists and Dutch still lives.  There was some cubism, and some things Steve wasn’t familiar with; bright sweeping lines and rich colors.  Nice photography and prints, too.

“Aren’t you a tall glass of water,” Stark said from behind him.  When Steve spun around, there he was, raising his eyebrows and winking.  Tony Stark was barefoot, his hair sticking up in several directions, with a crisp white shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck and pressed slacks.  He had a tumbler of scotch in hand.

Steve did not feel like a tall glass of water.  He felt damp.

Tony circled him, prowling.  “That jacket is…avant garde, I must say.  Very —“ he waved a hand “ — bold silhouette you have going.”

“Nice to meet you.  I’m Steve Rogers,” Steve said, sticking his hand out and trying to wrestle the interaction back into something _normal_.

“I _know_ , sweetheart,” Tony said, ignoring his hand.  “Rescue told me all about you.”

“Did you make her?” Steve asked.  It had been implied that Tony was a tech-man, and she said he was her boss.  It would fit together.

“Yes, the armor, that was me; she’s my bodyguard,” Tony said archly.  “Impressed?”

Steve hadn’t considered that there was a human woman underneath all that metal.  It was so nimble and smooth; Steve would have assumed a suit of armor would be bulkier.

“Oooh, speechless, how flattering,” Tony cooed.  “Let’s get you settled in, hm?  And slip you into something more comfortable.  Thor should have some clothes that will fit you for the short term.  JARVIS, wake up, buddy, I can’t believe you didn’t welcome our guest here, throw a wireframe over this guy and figure out what all his sizes are.  Order him, hm, I dunno, workout clothes -- Under-armor, not that North Face shit -- some jeans, nothing with logos, okay?  Merchandising Captain America, yikes.  Great, great, and spring for same-day shipping, I’m not an animal.”

Tony stopped talking to the air and turned on Steve with a practiced thousand-watt smile.  “You’re going to be all set.”

Belatedly, Steve dropped his hand to his side, giving up on the handshake, and let Tony lead him up the grand staircase.

And now he’s here, sitting on a too-soft bed, trying not to look at the uniform specs Tony sent him, along with a summons to the workshop to try on a prototype.

There’s no reason to be upset about it.  Tony already bought him a wardrobe and a half.  Steve needs something to replace the torn-up outfit he came out of the ice wearing, and the fabric of the future can do all sorts of magical things.  It stretches, it stiffens, it’s waterproof without being waxy, the rubbery parts doesn’t crack in the cold or the heat, and it doesn’t get musty with sweat.  The shoes alone — Steve went running in a pair of sneakers that gave him an extra three inches per stride.

The design looks very…tight.  Tony is going to look at his ass when he tries to put it on, Steve just _knows it,_ and the thought makes something in his gut squirm uncomfortably.  He imagines Tony’s wicked grin when he notices that Steve’s shy, and it rankles even without Tony being there, because Steve’s not shy, he was in the Army for Christ’s sake, it’s just that Tony makes him feel _vulnerable_ and that’s — unacceptable.

Steve Rogers has to be Captain America and Captain America isn’t vulnerable.

Steve huffs out a deep sigh and stands up.  He’s going to go for a run, and then he’s going to endure Tony’s uniform fitting.  It’s not like Steve’s never had anyone flirt with him.  The serum made him handsome and that’s a side effect he’ll just have to keep dealing with.

There’s no good reason for Tony to be worse than anyone else.

***

The team gives Steve a small glass rectangle and calls it a telephone.  It’s confusing at first, but he picks things up fast these days.  He figures out what kind of text means something is a button to press and what’s just text.  His fingers learn typing before his brain does, so he thinks of the idea he wants to send and and is almost surprised when it appears on the screen, all written out.

He meets the rest of the team: he and Thor are the only enhanced humans — Thor is some kind of God, which Steve doesn’t understand but he’s too tired to question it.  There’s one more guy on the team, Clint, a sniper with bow and arrows instead of guns.  He and Natasha do spy things, and Steve gets the impression that they do dirty work on the side.

Finally there’s Rescue, who’s a normal woman in a fantastic suit.  Steve tries to find out if she has a name other than Rescue, but she shakes her head.  “Just Rescue’s good.  I’m familiar with it now, and it’s weird to be called a real name that isn’t mine.”

For two weeks, Steve makes eggs for breakfast, two sandwiches with cold cuts for lunch (he gets hungry), and roasts chicken thighs and vegetables for dinner.

Then Rescue introduces him to _takeout_ , and Steve’s life is changed.

The creature comforts of the twenty-first century are extravagant.  He’s always warm and fed, and there are colors to look at that aren’t mud, mud, and more mud.  It doesn’t help with the way that the future is too loud, too fast, or how everyone feels obligated to be available all the time and expects that of him too, but it makes things a little better.

Still, when the first official call to fight something comes in, Steve is itching to punch something evil.  He hangs back as everyone suits up, until Rescue jets over.  

“Come on, Avenger, get your shield out,” she says, and he does.

***  

“Doombots again,” Clint says from his perch on a rooftop.

“ _For real?_ Ugh,” Rescue says.  “You punch a robot once, you think you’re done.”

Steve was right — the new uniform is _very_ clingy.  He gets briefed on the way over; the team’s been mopping up incursions of robots from someone called Doctor Doom (“Stupid mask, big green cape, absolutely infuriating,” Rescue says) once every month or two.  They’ve been trying to get a read on where he’s sending the robots from, but they arrive via portals that they can’t trace, and they always close before someone can get through and find out their origin that way.

So, for now it’s a grueling but uneventful chore to clear doombots out of Manhattan every now and again.

Steve finds that the team works smoothly together, and he fits right in.  Afterwards, they go for burgers, carrying them out in white paper bags and going to sit in Central Park.  Natasha feeds the pigeons bits of her bun.  Steve has three hamburgers, because fighting is hungry work.

Rescue doesn’t get any proper food, just a milkshake.

“Hard to eat with this on,” she says, tapping on her faceplate, when Steve asks.  “Straws are cool though.”

She fits the straw through the narrow mouth opening to demonstrate.  When she’s finished with her sip, the straw has red lipstick around it.

“See?  Delicious.  I’ll eat when I get home and out of this thing.”

Steve can’t look away from the smudge of red on the end of Rescue’s straw, and he feels himself flush.  He’s thinking about her mouth.

“Want some?” Rescue asks, misinterpreting Steve’s stare.  She holds the plastic cup out to him.  “It’s banana malt.”

“No — um — no thank you,” Steve says, weakly waving the last half of burger number three.  “I’m good with this.”

“Suit yourself,” Rescue says, and takes another drink.

***

“Steve!”

Steve is in the middle of writing up a report about the doombots fight and he doesn’t want to talk to Tony, but here’s Tony anyway, being too chipper which means he wants something.

“I have two invitations to the most delightful party tonight,” he says, “and nobody to bring along.”

“Take Natasha,” Steve says shortly.

“She’s busy.  And scary,” Tony says, coming around behind Steve’s desk, peering over his shoulder.  Steve hunches farther over the desk and tries not to notice the smell of Tony’s aftershave.  For a man who doesn’t touch anyone he has no concept of personal space.

“ _I’m_ busy,” Steve tries, even though that excuse hasn’t worked so far against Tony.

“You’re not,” Tony says confidently, which is galling because Tony always just assumes.  If Tony wants something, everything else comes second.

Steve rolls his eyes.  “If you don’t want to go alone, don’t go.  You get invited to parties more nights than not.  I know, because you complain about it.”

“I have to go.  There’s — some people I know there,” Tony says, and for a moment Steve thinks he hears something bleak in Tony’s tone, like he’s trapped and desperate to get out, and Steve is his only recourse.  Like he thinks Steve could save him from something terrible.

Then it’s gone.

“And there’ll be men in uniform,” Tony says, winking.  “Can’t miss that.”

Steve recoils.  He’s spent a long time not looking at men in uniform as anything more than brothers in arms, and the way Tony is treating them, like some sort of sex objects, feels filthy.

“No,” Steve says.

“Oh come _on_ ,” Tony whines.  “What are you doing, give me that, is this a _report?_ Steve, darling, this is a _gala_ , amazing food, beautiful people, and everyone will love you.  You’re moping, I can tell.  Let the people shower you with praise, that always makes me feel better.”

Tony is too close, fluttering but not touching, and then he literally steals the pen from Steve’s hand without so much as brushing their fingers together.  Tony makes the pen disappear into the pocket of his suit jacket and Steve doesn’t have an extra one and suddenly Steve has had _enough_.

“Stop that!” Steve says, too loud.

Tony dances backwards, a little fear flitting across his face.  Steve is a lot bigger than him.

Tony reaches back into his jacket and produces Steve’s pen.  “If you come with me, I’ll give you back your pen.  Since you like it so much.”  He dangles it in front of Steve’s nose, infuriating.  This is the problem with Tony, he always keeps pushing.

Steve just wants to reach out and make him be _still_.  

“Tony, sit _down_ ,” Steve says, pulling all of the authority he has from deep in his chest.  Tony jerks a little and then sits gingerly on the edge of Steve’s desk.  He reaches out and straightens Steve’s report, and Steve shoves the pages out of his reach.

“Stay there,” Steve says, using the same voice.  Tony does, watching with eyes that have gone bright and considering.  There’s a little color high in his cheeks.  “Good.”

“I’m into this, this orders thing,” Tony says, and he raises his eyebrows.  “What should I do next, _Captain?_ ”  Tony’s voice has gone low and sultry and Steve suddenly realizes what Tony is getting at.

Steve snaps to his feet, hot and embarrassed.

“That’s over the line,” Steve says, so angry he could spit.  “Way over the line.”

Tony has the courtesy to look somewhat chastised.  He opens his mouth and Steve doesn’t want to hear anything he has to say for himself, not right now, maybe not ever.

Before Tony can say whatever it is, Steve storms out of the room.

***

Steve discovers that he can use his telephone to watch any television he wants, anytime he wants.  For all that it’s called a phone, it seems like making calls is one of the more secondary functions.  He discovers M*A*S*H first, and spends several evenings in a row entranced.

The opening credits are rolling again when Tony sidles into the room.  Steve pauses the video — pausing, really a useful invention — and looks up at him.

“Here,” Tony says, throwing a heavy book down next to Steve on the couch.  From Tony’s uncomfortable posture, Steve thinks it might be an apology.  Typical of Tony, to apologize with things rather than words.

“I know you used to study art,” Tony says.  “Figured you might want to catch up, hit the books, see what you missed.”

Steve didn’t realize that Tony knew that about him.  He assumed Tony didn’t care.  Looking down at the book beside him, Steve sees it’s a broad volume with “Post-War American Art” printed across the front in large block letters.  It’s — thoughtful.  Steve doesn’t think of Tony as a thoughtful person; Tony is so loud and careless with other people’s boundaries that Steve assumed he barely noticed other people existed.

“Let me know if you like any of the artists; I’ll buy something original for you.”

Steve looks up at Tony in disbelief.  “I — that’s ridiculous.”

“Art is a good investment these days,” Tony says lightly, like he didn’t just offer to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Steve on the off chance Steve finds a painting he fancies.  “Seriously, compared to the suit upkeep alone, contemporary art is like buying a candy bar at the checkout aisle.  So, junior, how about some Now’n’Laters?  Buckeyes? Circus peanuts? You want that kiddie vape juice?  Don’t be shy, okay, I rifle through New York art auctions like Macklemore at a Goodwill.”

Steve tries not to scowl at Tony’s offhand tone; he used to be glad to shop at thrift stores.  Tony doesn’t mean anything behind it, he’s deflecting around something else, not trying to deliberately needle Steve.

“If you want something older, more familiar, I can get that too,” Tony adds breezily.  “Anything that makes you happy.”

For some reason Steve blushes at that.  He picks up the book and smooths his fingers over the cover.  It’s glossy and new but when he looks closer he notices that the spine is creased and there’s a few grease marks along the edges, like Tony read some of it while he was in his workshop, in snatches of time between projects.  Like Tony might want to talk to Steve about art later.

“Thanks, Tony,” Steve says quietly.

“It’s nothing.  Don’t make this a thing, Steve, it’s not going to be a thing.”

“This is —“

“Don’t mention it, bubeleh,” Tony says, a little of the hostile flirtatious drawl back in his voice for no reason whatsoever.  “It’s a gift.”

Steve wonders if maybe Tony’s honey-laced flirting serves the same purpose as Steve’s own steely-voiced snappishness when his temper gets the better of him.  Something for pushing away.  Something that hides emotion.

Tony’s not as much of a cipher as Steve thought.  He’s not sure how he feels about that.

***

Rescue doesn’t spend a lot of time indoors.

“I’m hard on furniture,” she laughs, when Steve asks.  “The suit is _very_ heavy.  I’m hard on staircases and floors too, honestly.”

Of course soon as Steve is paying attention he notices that Rescue stands during team meetings, and that she pauses on the threshold of any building she enters, scanning for their load-bearing capacity.

“I hate elevators,” Rescue says, hugging her arms around her chest.  “I hate them, I don’t care if this says its maximum weight is eleven hundred pounds, I _hate_ elevators in general, and this elevator in particular.”

Steve puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder.  “Secret underground base.  Can’t fly in through the window, sorry.”

They’ve sniffed out a place where they think the doombots might be coming from.  The Fantastic Four passed along a tip about a farm up in Vermont, and the Avengers sent Steve and Rescue to investigate.

When they got there, sure enough, a quick radar sweep revealed a secret bunker underneath a barn in one of the back fields.  There was also a freight elevator.

“I could have dropped down the shaft,” Rescue says darkly.  “I’m good at wrenching doors open.”

“Well, I wanted your company,” Steve says.  “And I’d rather not leave incriminating finger-shaped dents all over the secret Doctor Doom hideout, if it’s all the same to you.”

The elevator dings, announcing the bottom floor, and Steve braces behind his shield, ready for incoming fire.  Rescue puts her hands up, palms out, ready to crisp anything in front of her.

“Well, that’s a real blue-balls of an entrance,” Rescue says, dropping her hands in the face of an empty corridor.

Steve’s surprised enough to laugh, a big genuine sound that he didn’t know he could make anymore.  Rescue is as vulgar as a soldier, and she doesn’t tamp it down in front of Steve.  Sure, Steve likes people to respect his boundaries, and some things from the future really throw him, but he’s not _naive._

Everyone except Rescue treats Steve with kid gloves.  But, Steve realizes, that’s not really true, is it.  Tony doesn’t either.

The search continues to be anticlimactic.  Doctor Doom has cleared out completely.  They go back up the elevator, Rescue grumbling the entire time, and settle down to wait for their ride home.

“I guess we’ll just wait here,” Rescue says, sitting down on the ground next to the wooden barn doors.  Steve sits down on a hay bale and smiles at the mental image of Rescue sitting down on the bale next to him and going right through it.  Maybe he could draw a cartoon of that.  He could give it to Rescue, as a joke about this flop of a mission.

“I went down that elevator for nothing, Steve.  For nothing.”

They have about an hour before the Quinjet to arrive.  This mission was supposed to take some time, but it doesn’t take very long to examine bare concrete bunkers.  There hadn’t even been any secret passageways.

Steve realizes this is a chance to bring up his…feelings…for Rescue.  He’s thought about it, and he thinks she likes him alright, and he’s _lonely_.  It wouldn’t be anything big, just — they could try.  Steve likes having someone to look forward to, and Rescue enjoys kicking back with him as a teammate at least, and she’s beautiful in the armor.

“Rescue,” Steve says carefully.

“Mmm?” Rescue replies, gravelly through the suit.  She’s got her head tipped back, staring up at the sky.  It’s a nice day, almost uncomfortably bright after the gloom underground.

“If you want, maybe soon — we could go somewhere together.  I’d like to spend time with you.  When we’re not punching robots.”

“Oh, Steve, darl — buddy, I can’t,” Rescue says, and her voice sounds regretful.  “You’re lovely, and I wish we could, but that won’t work.”

Steve tucks his knees into his chest, feeling stupid for running his mouth.  It was better to get it out early, before he’d nursed the idea into a full-blown fantasy.  Better to nip it in the bud.  He still feels hurt.

“Is it because you’re sleeping with Stark?” Steve asks, blurting it out in a fit of self-pity.  As soon as he says it he feels _worse_ , what a completely inappropriate thing to say.

But Rescue laughs, like he’s told a really good joke.  The speakers in the suit whine with feedback as she gets too loud for it inside the helmet.

Steve is confused, and even more stung, and he makes an abortive motion with his hand.  “It’s not — I’m just concerned.  He’d be taking advantage, you’re his _employee_ and given your secret identity he’s made himself your only option.  It’s just like him, really, to choose a woman and then abuse his power.”

“ _Steve_ ,” Rescue says, more firmly this time.  “I love you, you nutty jealous bastard, but Tony and I aren’t like that.”

In the future, apparently people tell you they love you right after shooting you down for a date, Steve thinks bitterly.  “If he ever tried anything —” Steve says darkly.

“I know, you’d sock him in the jaw.”

“Are you _sure_?” Steve asks, because he doesn’t trust Tony an inch.

Rescue laughs again, gentler this time.  Steve scowls anyway, because he still doesn’t know what’s funny about this.  “I swear on my glowing metal heart, there will never, ever, be any sort of relationship between me and Tony Stark,” she says, tapping the glowing arc reactor that powers the suit.

“Then why —“ _Why not me,_ Steve wants to ask, and he’s practically _whining_.

“Secret identity, Steve,” Rescue says, like she knows exactly what he’s thinking.  It must be written all over his face.  “It’s not fair to you, when there’s so much about me you can’t know.  I don’t know if you’d like me so much without the armor.”

“I would,” Steve says earnestly.  “I promise.”

Rescue sighs, and then her posture changes.  She reaches for him a little.  Steve flinches back, because he _cannot_ take any more mixed signals today.  He’s still a little jittery from the adrenaline come-down from their non-battle.

“You singed your eyebrow off in that stupid fight yesterday,” she says, because apparently they’re not going to talk about relationships anymore.  “Burning Man got you.”

Steve touches his face, self-conscious.

“Don’t worry, you’re so blonde I didn’t notice until now.  Your brows are practically invisible.”

Sure enough, his left eyebrow has been reduced to prickly stubble.  He knew he was close to one of the flame blasts, near enough that it turned his skin pink, but that had healed by the time he got back to the mansion.  “I guess the serum doesn’t affect hair growth,” he says, shrugging.  “It’ll come back.”

“I have eyebrow pencil if you want in the meantime,” Rescue says, and he can hear the smile on her voice even underneath the ever-present hiss of static.  Maybe, Steve thinks, that means she’s blonde too.  He’s going to be looking twice at every light-haired woman on the street for weeks, now, hunting for the confident sway of Rescue’s walk, and he knows he’s ridiculous but he can’t help it.

“Maybe if we have a press event,” Steve allows.

Rescue claps her hands together delightedly.  The gauntlets don’t lend themselves well to applause, so it’s more of a bright clink.  “Please let me teach Captain America how to put on TV makeup.  I have so many YouTube tutorials for you.”

“Actually,” Steve says, “the old chorus line girls taught me how to do up a stage face.  Nothing fancy, but I can draw my own brows on.”

Rescue makes a little noise, uninterpretable through the suit speakers.  “I’ll tell you this, you’ve got depths,” Rescue says, shifting her hips a little.  “Mascara’s waterproof now,” she adds in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Really?  The girls would have killed for that.  They’d always sweat through it by the end of the show.  The lights, you know.”

It’s hard, thinking about the people he knew from before.  All the dancers he knew are in nursing homes or in the ground.  He remembers them smoking backstage, passing their cigarettes back and forth, wiping lipstick off of each other’s teeth.

“Tell me about them?” Rescue asks quietly, sensing his mood.

“Okay,” Steve says, and talks about the stupid war bonds circuit, which segues into the Howling Commandos, funny little stories about equipment malfunctions and the terrible roads and cheating at cards.

When their ride shows up, Steve feels the hurt from Rescue’s rejection has almost smoothed over.

Then Steve gets back to the mansion, and Tony shows up in an absolutely foul mood, already drinking.

Worse, Clint’s been planning a team dinner for two weeks, and Steve is obligated to attend along with Tony.  It’s a magnificent spread, enough to feed four superheroes and one incredibly rich and sulky industrialist.  The table is set in Tony’s spacious dining room, with more flatware and glassware than Steve’s ever seen.  There’s mushroom soup, sweet fennel rolls, a marbled roast wrapped around rosemary and potatoes, and an entire brown spotted trout that’s been packed in salt, fresh dill and citrus, then baked until the delicate flesh flakes off the bone.

Tony fills his plate and starts to tuck in.

“You’re not even going to say grace?” Steve asks stiffly.

Tony laughs and tears open a steaming roll.  “God and I don’t exactly _mesh_.”  He reaches across Steve to snatch the butter dish.  Tony has a special knife for butter, despite having _two_ perfectly serviceable knives next to his plate.  It looks delicate in his hands, at odds with the scrapes and bruises across his knuckles.  Dropped something in the workshop, Tony had said.

“He left me in a cave in Afghanistan to rot.  Torture is hell on faith,” Tony says, and his face for a moment opens up, revealing a quiet, far-away pain.

 _That doesn’t mean He abandoned you_ , Steve thinks; he draws breath to articulate that thought but Tony anticipates it.  All his walls slam down again, and he looks angry.

“If you tell me everything happens for a reason, I swear to God, Rogers, I will melt your shield down and use it to make a limited edition line of sex toys that you can shove up your ass.”

Steve bristles.  He’s been through worse than Tony, and the man acts like he’s the only one who’s suffered, like his reaction is the only reasonable one.  Like Steve’s stupid or naive for his faith.  “When you’re watching your fellow soldiers die in a fox hole, all you can do is pray for them,” Steve says acidly.  “But you’ve never done that.”

Tony shoves back from the table hard enough to make the wine glasses clink together.  “I’m not hungry,” he says tightly.  “I’ll be in the workshop.”  He leaves the bread on his plate, warm butter melting across it, untouched.

Clint shoots Steve a disappointed look, and he bows his head, ashamed.  Tony started it, but he didn’t deserve Steve being mean to him, just because he’s crabby about being turned down that afternoon.

After they’ve eaten, Steve assembles a plate with a little bit of everything from dinner.  He carries it down to Tony’s workshop.  He steps gingerly through the door, holding the plate out in front of him like a horizontal shield.

Tony looks up from where he’s soldering a circuit board, then scowls and bends down farther over his work.  It’s going to be like that, then.  Steve puts the food down on top of a toolbox by the door and retreats without saying a word.

***

Rescue is kind about rejecting Steve.  They stay friends, and Steve tries not to pine.  He has some fantasies; the best one is where Rescue decides she trusts him with her secret, just him, and she pulls off the helmet and kisses him, and she’s funny and talkative and sweet in bed, and they get to eat together, finally, and he can hold her and find out if she always smells like the suit, engine grease and ozone, or if she has her own smell for him to discover.

It’s stupid, but Steve knows what it’s like to wait out a crush, and there’s nothing for it but time.  He thinks Natasha’s on to him, maybe, but she doesn’t joke about it, and Steve’s grateful for it.

Tony and Rescue are scarce for a few weeks — California, apparently — and Steve does small rescue missions in the meantime.  It’s flash flood and tornado season in the Midwest, and he’s happy to be useful.  He doesn’t like diving into cold water to pry kids out of sinking cars, but it’s saving people.

He asks NOAA if he can record a public service announcement telling people not to drive through places where the water covers the road.  Maybe if he glares hard enough into a camera, he can guilt people into not drowning.  What a plus to being Captain America.

Steve knows Tony is back when he arrives at the mansion and there’s fifteen reporters staking out their door.

“Captain, over here please!”

“Do you have a comment?”

“How does Captain America feel about Tony Stark’s past indiscretions?”

The way the reporter says the word _indiscretions_ makes the hair on the back of Steve’s neck stand up.  If this is about the arms dealing, it could be bad for the team, but this feels different.  There aren’t any protestors, just the press.  Usually if they’re going to call Tony a monster, people come with signs.

“I just want to go for a run,” Steve growls, and shoulders his way through the crowd.

When he comes back, Tony is sitting miserably on a stool at the breakfast bar.  The Daily Mail is laying in front of him.  The headline says COKE AND BLOKES, with a big picture of Tony, eyes wide and dark, shirtless, with someone’s hand wrapped around his chest from behind.  It’s unmistakably a man’s hand, even though only Tony’s face is visible.  He looks so young.

In front of him, Tony has a scotch.  When Steve comes up to lean on the counter across from him, Tony tips the glass up towards him in a half toast.  He doesn’t look great.

So.  Indiscretions.

“Daily Mail’s still around and still a rag, I see,” Steve says dryly.

“Yep.  Like a cockroach; just won’t die,” Tony says.  His voice is raspy, and Steve’s not sure why he sounds so bad — Tony’s reputation as something of a sex fiend is well-established.  Steve had assumed Tony’s interest in men was public knowledge.  He flirts enough.  Maybe it’s the drugs?

Steve reaches out and flips the paper over so Tony’s face is covered.  He doesn’t like looking at it.  It feels like staring into something private, even though Tony isn’t a private person.  Except — Tony reveals too much, but he always does it on purpose, to shock people or to slyly hand over a secret for them to keep.

“They lie,” Steve says.  “It’s been their business model forever.”

“Oh,” Tony drawls, “Therein lies the rub.  This is all very true.  Gala schmoozing, not always effective, turns out.  At least I’m not doing anything illegal in the video, small mercies.  God.”

Tony licks his lips and takes another drink.  It’s morning, Steve thinks, disapproving.

“It’s fine though,” Tony says, his eyes turning distant and cold.  “This is a thing that happens to me from time to time.”

Tony’s even more covered up than usual.  He has a silk scarf tight around his neck, tucked right up to his chin.  Steve imagines someone filming _him_ , in a situation like _that_ , and he feels a wave of nausea.  Nobody should ever have done that to Tony.  Steve grits his teeth in anger.

“Granted, this isn’t exactly how I would have liked you to find out I sleep with men,” Tony says.

Steve’s eyes widen.  He realizes that he’s frowning and Tony must have thought he was mad at _him_.  “I thought that was obvious.  You — you flirt.  With everyone.”

“Oh,” Tony says.  “Right.  Of course.  Well, good.”

Steve doesn’t have to _like_ that Tony is — has — _indiscretions_ — with men —to know it’s not right that the papers are doing this to him.  “They violated your privacy, Tony!”

Tony takes a slug of liquor and grimaces.  “I don’t have privacy anymore.  Welcome to the information age, old man.  Someone is _always_ watching you, and the only thing that protects you from it is that for most people, nobody fucking cares.  Everything comes out eventually.  Hah, comes out.  Good pun.”

Steve doesn’t quite get the last thing Tony said, but he catches the drift.

“I’ll make them take it down,” Steve vows.  “The video at least.  They shouldn’t share that without your consent.”

“You’re sweet,” Tony sighs into his drink.  Steve raises his eyebrows.  People don’t usually call him sweet.  Tony looks like he’d rather be talking about anything else.

“How about you tell me about the updates you have planned for Rescue’s armor,” Steve suggests.  Tony grabs for the new conversational topic like a lifeline.

“Yes, please.  I was thinking about some for you, actually.  If she’s going to carry you around battle sometimes it’d be nice to have some kind of safety mechanism.  Because — honestly — can you imagine dropping Captain America, the PR nightmare if you split open your skull.  But it would have to be quick-release, no carabiner clips, obviously.  Maybe magnets?  How much do you weigh?  Nevermind, I’ll ballpark it and double that.  Triple it, at least.  Ideally you’d have a custom harness the suit could latch onto.”

“Are you looking for another chance to pat my ass in a fitting?” Steve asks, trying not to smile.  He’s going to have a sense of humor about this for Tony, because Tony’s having a bad day.  Steve’s always had a sense of humor; it’s just been a little buried lately.

“I — no!  It’s a nice ass, lovely ass darling, but I’m actually concerned about your safety, you can’t keep _jumping off things_ , oh god, you’re making fun of me.  Are you?  Tell me you’re making fun of me.”

“A bit,” Steve admits.

Tony smiles, the first time he hasn’t looked abjectly miserable in this entire conversation.  “So, you willing to endure a trip to the workshop with me in exchange for safer Rescue rides?”

The thought of Rescue having special modifications to her armor _just for Steve_ makes Steve feel warm all over.  He likes the idea more than he really should.  Tony notices.

“You really like her, huh?” Tony asks.

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.  That’s real good.”  Tony looks sad again, although Steve doesn’t know exactly why.  Time for another topic change.

“Want some Chinese takeout?” Steve asks.  

“Yes,” Tony says, pointing a decisive finger at Steve.  “The real stuff from that basement place, none of the Panda Express bull.  I’m going to get you to eat gen- _u_ -ine chicken feet and tripe, bucko.”

Steve shrugs.  “I’ve eaten weirder.  As long as it’s not unsalted and boiled to death, sounds good to me.”

“Full of surprises, you are.  You have to pick it up, though, I’m not walking through the vultures outside.  Not today.”

“You got it,” Steve says.  When Tony’s distracted re-filling his glass, Steve slides the Daily Mail off the counter and tucks it into the garbage.

***

It’s the same battle as it’s been the past several months — the doombots come swarming through flickering green portals, and Natasha vaults over the robots, flipping towards the portals, trying to get through one before it closes so she can find where Doctor Doom is sending the things from.

They wink closed just before she makes it, as usual, and then it’s cleanup, also as usual.

“I’m getting real sick of these fuckers,” Rescue complains into Steve’s private channel.  “After this, you have to take me out for a really _nice_ milkshake, Rogers.”

“Yes ma’am,” Steve says, slamming his shield into the neck of one of the bots and using it as a pry-bar to pop the head loose.

There’s a commotion in the center of the robot scrum that Steve’s never seen before.  The bots are climbing on top of each other, locking together into a single, larger shape.  A doombot made of doombots, new and delightful.  Rescue streaks into view from around the corner of a skyscraper, circling the stack of robots.

“Great, now we’re in a mecha anime,” Rescue shouts.  “Remind me to have you watch one of those, they’re horrible, you’ll hate it.”

“Can I get a ride instead of movie recommendations?” Steve says.

Rescue flashes him an okay sign, then swoops down to pick Steve up and toss him onto the doombot amalgam’s back.  She attaches herself to its shoulder, firing repulsor blasts into the joint, trying to unhook the robots from each other.  It’s smart, and Steve works on a complementary approach, going for the carapace on its back.  If he can just get into the wiring of the central robot, maybe the entire thing will fall apart.

At the big bot’s feet, Thor is swinging his hammer in wide arcs, scattering robots right and left.  Natasha and Clint are back to back.  Natasha shoves her electric gauntlets into the chinks in the doombot armor, then rips handfuls of wires out while the robots are temporarily paralyzed.  Clint picks off robots at a distance with his bow, and calls out targets for Natasha.

“Natasha, Clint, Thor, you keep doing what you’re doing and stop any more robots from latching onto the big guy,” Steve yells into the team comms.  “Rescue and I will stay here and see what we can do.”

As long as the central robot doesn’t get any bigger, Steve thinks they can handle this.

Then the robot reaches around its back and grabs Steve around the waist.  His next thought is _that’s more flexibility than I would have expected for something that bulky_ , and then he’s flying into the side of a parking garage.

Steve feels his ribs crack as he slides down to the sidewalk.  He’s going to feel this one in the morning.  He pushes himself up onto all fours, then to his feet, and he sways — there’s something wrong with his ankle but he can’t think about that right now — and watches in horror as the big robot reaches to tear up a length of twisted rebar from the rubble, concrete still stuck to one end in jagged chunks, and stabs it up underneath Rescue’s armpit.

The armor sparks and starts to give.  Rescue tries to jerk away, firing all four repulsors in the opposite direction, but the robot has one arm wrapped around her in a bear hug, unmoved by the heat of Rescue’s repulsors against its chest, and stabs again.

The rebar twists, bends, and then goes _in_ and Rescue screams into the comms.

It drops her; she tries to fly, but one of her arms is dead weight and she can’t balance.  The force of her own thrusters flip her onto her back and drive her down onto bare concrete sidewalk.  She skids in a shower of sparks, twenty feet at least, and then lays in a heap, not moving.

Steve is running, ankle be damned, _Rescue, please, Rescue,_ as fast as he can, when Thor bellows, “Get down!”

Steve drops — soldier’s instincts — and Thor calls down lightning.  Everything is limned with St. Elmo’s fire, and then with a crack and a blinding flash, the doombots are smoldering piles of slag, and Thor is unconscious in the center of a charred black circle, ten feet wide.

Steve’ll probably feel bad later, how little he cares about Thor’s welfare, but Rescue is bleeding out across the street, if her lung isn’t collapsing, if it missed her heart, if she’s not gone already.

He runs, and drops to his knees at her side so hard he can feel the skin on his shins start to bleed.

She’s still breathing — he can hear that through the radio.  It’s ragged and each breath comes with a sticky ripping sound that means not all is right with her lungs, but she’s alive.  What worries Steve most is the blood leaking from the cracks in her armor.  It’s flowing down the seams between the metal plates, extra red detailing.

“Steve, hey, hey, baby, it’s good to see you,” Rescue wheezes.

If Steve doesn’t get her out of the armor, she’s going to die in it.  “I have to get you out of this,” Steve says, reaching for her.

“No!” Rescue shouts, and she scrambles backward, even though it makes the rebar in her side shift, makes her yell in pain.

Steve grabs her, holding her still, swinging one leg over her stomach so he can sit on her thighs, one hand on her uninjured shoulder to keep her down.  “Rescue, come on, please, I can keep a secret.  Your identity isn’t worth your life.”

“Please, no, please, I’ll be fine, _Steve_ , don’t!”

“I don’t care who you are,” Steve says.  “I love you.  I’ll still love you.  It’s okay.”  He hasn’t told her he loved her before.  It’s selfish; she doesn’t want to hear it, but if she dies Steve wants to have said it.

“No, no, no no no, no,” Rescue chants, and her breaths are getting weaker and Steve doesn’t have a choice.

Steve struggles to find the release catches in the helmet; if he gets that off she’ll be able to breathe better, and he can work down her chest and try to get the bleeding stopped.

Eventually he gets frustrated and wedges his fingers in under the chin of the faceplate and wrenches upwards.  Tony can make Rescue a new suit.  He’s useful enough for that.

The helmet comes free in a tangle of wires and — it’s Tony.  Tony is in the suit.  With his eyes shut tight and all of the blood drained from his face.

It’s Tony.

Steve’s mind stutters, goes blank.

“Hi, Steve,” Tony whispers, opening his eyes.  “You still love me?”

Steve stands up, taking a shaky step backwards.  It’s Tony, it’s always been Tony in the suit, Tony is Rescue and it all makes sense, why he’s never seen Tony and Rescue in the same room, not ever, why Tony is so _tired_ and why he gets so banged up in his workshop.  And he — Tony let Steve — no —Steve is _not_ like that.  He isn’t.  He can’t be, this is Tony’s fault.

Tony turns his head to the side and coughs.  A fine spray of blood hits the shoulder of the armor.  “Rogers, if you let me bleed out because you’re having a gay panic, I will haunt your wet dreams until you die.”

On autopilot, Steve strips Tony out of the rest of the suit.  Tony makes him leave the chest plate on — he says something garbled about his heart, and Steve can get at the wound without taking it off anyway.

He’s never gotten to touch Tony before.  Or Rescue, for that matter.  He’d always wondered what it would be like to peel her out of the suit, piece by piece, revealing the soft skin underneath the hard metal armor.  Tony is wearing a skin-tight black bodysuit under the armor, and it clings everywhere.  Steve notes blankly that Tony is more muscular than he had thought; Tony must wear loose clothes to hide it.  He’s lithe and graceful, with none of the leisurely paunch Steve had always assumed lay hidden under Tony’s scrupulously buttoned shirts.

Steve pulls his utility knife out of his boot and cuts away the undersuit under Tony’s arm, peeling the fabric away to see how bad the entry wound is.

There’s red lace under the black suit.  Steve’s mouth goes dry and his heart speeds up.  Tony is wearing a bra.  Woodenly, Steve slides his fingers farther under Tony’s cut-open suit, feeling how the rough lace hugs Tony’s chest.  Then he jerks his hand away, horrified with himself.  Tony wears women’s underthings, like a fucking queer, and that’s wrong, unnatural.  It doesn’t matter how lenient the future is; Steve never wants to touch Tony again.  It’s a small mercy that Tony doesn’t touch anyone anyway.

“You—you’re wearing—“ Steve says, glaring at Tony.

“Verisimilitude,” Tony gasps.  “You like it?”

“No,” Steve snaps.

He’d say more, but Clint and Natasha jog up to Tony — Rescue — Tony — and stop dead when they see his face.

“Huh,” Clint says.

“That explains a lot,” Natasha adds.

Tony’s head has fallen back, his eyes fluttering, and his breaths are practically bubbling now.  There’s sweat plastering his hair to the side of his face, and there’s fine droplets of blood around his nose, in his beard, on his teeth.  Steve wants to shake him.  What is he doing in the armor, where does he get off throwing himself into this, a _civilian_ , a person whose chief pleasures are aged scotch and tiny circuit boards and getting under Steve’s skin?   _You let Rescue risk herself_ , Steve’s mind supplies, unhelpful, _and you care more about her than about Tony._  Steve shoves that down, because Rescue _doesn’t exist_ ; she was Tony the whole time.  All of Steve’s feelings are unmoored, and he feels like he’s drifting out to sea.

Tony gasps again, then swallows convulsively on blood.  He’s not talking anymore.  Tony not talking is a bad, bad sign.

“We need to get him some medical treatment, right away,” Steve grinds out.

Natasha’s eyes flick from Tony lying prone in the suit, to Steve’s face, and back to Tony.  Her lips tighten into a thin line, and then she looks at Steve with immense pity.  “Okay.  Let’s not lose two Avengers in one,” she says, with finality that means they won’t be talking about this any more until later.

***

Tony’s in SHIELD medical for six weeks.  Steve almost visits him, twice, and both times he can’t make himself do it.  He’s too angry.

He cared, cared _so much_ , about a person who doesn’t exist.  Steve feels like he’s mourning her even though nobody died.

“Tony’s awake,” Clint says, walking in on Steve in the gym.  “I wasn’t going to say anything, but he wanted you to know.”

Steve racks his free weights.

“You’re being a real douchebag, you know,” Clint adds.

“Thanks for the input,” Steve says.  If the team wants to take sides, that’s fine.

***

Tony comes home with explicit instructions not to lift anything heavy that are relayed to everyone in the mansion, because SHIELD correctly surmised that Tony would ignore it.

Jarvis calls Steve forty-five minutes after Tony arrives.  “Captain, Mr. Stark has ensconced himself in the workshop and is not responding to my requests that he reschedule armor repairs for a time when he’s more healed.”

Steve hears Tony’s voice in the background.  “Jarvis, you dick, who are you calling?  I didn’t build you to tattle on me.  You fucking snitch.  It had better not be Steve.  I cannot, I absolutely will not, endure a lecture from Steve right now.  It is Steve, isn’t it?  Gross.  I can’t believe you did this to me, J.”

“All other Avengers are unavailable.”

“Fuck,” Tony says, vehement.  “Jarvis, lock every door between my workshop and Steve’s location.”

“I do not believe that would be in your best interest, sir.”

“I hate this,” Tony says.  “I just got out of the hospital, everyone is supposed to be nice to me and glad I’m alive.”

“Captain, please help Mr. Stark comply with his doctor’s orders,” Jarvis says, sounding dangerously close to begging.  For a computer, Jarvis seems to genuinely care about Tony.

“I’m on it,” Steve says, trying to figure out how he feels about Tony being back on his feet.  He has two flights of stairs and a long hallway to figure it out.

Angry, definitely.  Steve’s been told he’s better than average at holding a grudge.  He’s relieved too, complexly, and something else, a desire to take Tony and _shake_ him, tell him to never pull another stunt like that, which is different from the anger somehow.  Steve wants to lock Tony in a room and station himself outside the door, protecting Tony from the world and the world from Tony.

When Steve gets to the workshop he can hear Tony throwing things.  There’s a loud clatter and a ruined gauntlet skitters across the floor into Steve’s field of view.  It looks like Tony’s ripped all the servos out of it and then burnt what was left.

There’s a post-it stuck to the door.   _Genius at work, don’t come in.  If you’re Pepper, I’ll sign it later._

Steve opens the door.

Tony’s surrounded by glowing blue screens.  As Steve watches, he spins the schematic floating in front of him, then makes an annoyed noise and tosses it across the room.  The hologram makes a crunching noise and vanishes.  When Tony puts his arm back down he hides a wince, poorly.

“You owe me an apology,” is the first thing Tony says.  “Spit it out.”  

Steve frowns.  Where does Tony get off, asking _Steve_ for an apology right now?

Tony spins around on his stool, fixes Steve with a glare, and keeps talking.  “Two apologies, actually. Hello, I’m Clippy, it looks like you’re writing an apology.  Would you like help?  Apology one: I’m sorry, Tony, for not coming to your bedside even once, or sending flowers, or acknowledging at all that you endured four surgeries and a secondary infection and the endless goddamn boredom of midday soaps for over a month!”

Steve frowns harder.  He likes the old soap operas, and the new ones.  It’s good to know that some things never change, and you can still jump right into the middle of any soap and enjoy it like you’ve been watching from the start.

“Apology two: I’m sorry, Rescue, for outing you, which was shitty of me, especially because you asked me — no, begged me — not to.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Steve says flatly.

Tony throws up his hands and winces again.  “Could you drop the self-righteous shit for like, twenty minutes?”

“I think _you_ owe everyone an apology, actually,” Steve says.

Tony sputters.  “ _What?_ Jesus Christ, this is rich, okay, fine, tell me what I’m supposed to be sorry for.”

“You don’t have anything to say for yourself for deceiving everyone about Rescue?”

At that, Tony’s face gets downright ugly.  Steve’s reminded that as Rescue, Tony’s killed people.  Not just supervillains, who pop back up like death is a vacation in the Maldives, but real human beings, enemy combatants and terrorists, who die with finality.  Tony’s not a soldier, but he’s got a body count just like Steve does.  He’s capable of being dangerous.

“No,” Tony answers, “I don’t.”

“You’re selfish,” Steve says.

Tony jerks up off of his stool and dismisses his screens with a sharp wave of his hand.  “Oh?”

“I could scratch you for this.  I should,” Steve says.  “You’re reckless and unstable.”

“Don’t you dare!” Tony yells.  “Don’t even think about it.”

“You lied to the whole team!” Steve yells back.

“Rescue is the only thing — the literal only thing — in my life that makes me feel like I’m doing something.  She is the _one_ chance I get to be good.  So yeah, I lied, because I thought if anyone knew it was me in the suit they’d have benched me. And I was a right, turns out!”

“It’s not about your _secret_ _identity_ , Stark!”

“Oh,” Tony says, dripping venom, and he’s shorter than Steve but he’s practically vibrating with fury.  Steve backs up a step despite the fact that he could punch Tony across the room if he wanted to.  “So it really is all about the woman thing.”

“It’s wrong,” Steve says.

Tony advances on him, and Steve retreats until his thighs hit the workbench that stretches against the entire wall of Tony’s shop.  Tony’s all the way up in Steve’s personal space.  Steve wants to get away, and he wants to freeze, and he wants to put his hand on Tony’s chest and _push_ , show the man — something.  Instead he stands and stares.  Tony puts his hands down on the bench to either side of Steve’s hips, and Steve is trapped as inescapably as if he had a gun trained to his head.

“You’re angry because your dick got hard over someone who didn’t have the nice pussy you were imagining.”  Tony’s eyes dip down, scanning Steve from neck to crotch and back up again, and then he smiles, angry and wicked.  “Sorry to disappoint, baby.”

“That isn’t —“ Steve says, but that’s a lie, Tony’s being vulgar but he’s right, and Steve’s afraid because if he liked Rescue, he liked Tony, and the strange raw heat he feels around Tony makes a terrible kind of sense.

“It _is_ ,” Tony hisses. “I turned you down to avoid _exactly_ this problem.  I don’t have time to deal with your homophobic ass.”

He’s not — Steve believes in equality for all.  It’s just — Steve has a sudden intrusive thought that if he kissed Tony, right now, the energy in the entire room would turn upside-down.

Before Steve can process that thought, Tony stomps away, looking half-ready to throw a wrench across the garage.  “God _fucking_ damn it,” he says, and kicks a toolbox.  “Captain America’s a bigot.  I am — wow — really not handling this well.  This feels significantly worse than I expected!”  

Tony makes a strangled noise that might be a laugh but sounds a lot like a sob.  “Did you know I almost believed you, right at the end, when you said you’d still love me out of the suit?  Just for a second, I thought maybe you would.”

“ _Can we stop talking about this!_ ” Steve shouts.

“Yes,” Tony says acidly.  “Let’s.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to drink an entire fifth of vodka.  And before you ask, no, you can’t have any.”

“You shouldn’t mix alcohol with the opioids you’re on,” Steve says.  “And don’t lift anything.”

“Hey, Steve?” Tony says, his tone sickly-sweet, “Go fuck yourself.”

Steve doesn’t have a comeback for that, and then he’s alone in Tony’s shop, surrounded by bits of Rescue’s armor.  Before his injury Tony had been in the middle of a redesign, like always.  There’s the beginning of that safety harness Tony had promised draped over a mannequin in the far corner.

Steve imagines flying through a fight, pressed close against Rescue’s chest, her laugh in his ear, and feels achingly bereft.  Tony’s left a blueprint for Rescue’s face plate spread across his bench.  The edges are held down by two coffee cups and what looks like a chunk of doombot, with one corner free to curl up into itself.

He spreads it flat again and weighs the last corner down with a nearby pile of washers.

Tony’s blocky draftsman’s scrawl is spread across the schematic, planned tweaks and reminders that he’d jotted down mindlessly on anything that was there.  There’s one note that says “Gold paintjob?” but it’s scratched out, and underneath Tony’s written, “Steve likes red.”

 _I wish you were here, Rescue,_  Steve thinks, and it’s awful because in a way she is — upstairs, drinking vodka, thinking Steve’s a monster.

***

“It was nice of Doom to wait until we had Rescue back on her feet,” Clint says, balancing on one foot while he pulls his boots on.  As he speaks, Tony comes tearing down the stairs, wrapped in a bathrobe.  The shining metal of his breastplate is visible through in the deep vee of the robe.  Tony doesn’t mind if they see, now.

“Thank you for waiting, sweet cheeks,” Tony says, sweeping past Clint and blowing him an air kiss.

“Save it for Cap, Tony, I’m not taking that bait,” Clint growls, swatting at him.

Steve doesn’t want to engage with _that_ right now.  Or ever.  “We have doombots to deal with, folks,” Steve says.

They miss the portals again.  Steve wants to scream with frustration, throw his shield, anything to stop fighting the same idiot fight over and over again.  The bots didn’t combine into a mecha-bot this time, a small mercy.  Steve doesn’t know if he could stand fighting one of those without imagining Rescue going down, again and again.  In battle, Rescue was just like she always had been.  Steve had been so tempted to pretend that it wasn’t Tony.  It was the same voice, the same gleaming armor, the same easy joy as she picked Steve up and flung him into the fray.  As _he_ picked Steve up.  As —Steve shakes his head.

Natasha steps over a torn-up doombot and claps him on the shoulder.  “Next time,” she says gently.  Natasha always knows when Steve’s in a mood — sometimes better than he knows himself.

Steve hangs his head.  He feels lightheaded.  His metabolism is getting ahead of him after the fight.  “I need a protein shake, or I’m going to crash.”

“You hate protein shakes,” Natasha reminds him.

Steve sighs and makes a face.  Protein powder is light and travels well in his pockets, which makes it his only post-battle choice most of the time.  “You have other options?”

Natasha points across the street to a Halal food cart.  Remarkably, the cart’s owner hasn’t fled in the robot attack; he’s already lifting the awning back up and brushing rubble dust off of the menu.

“Everyone’s so used to this,” Steve says.  “It’s happening so often it’s not even shocking.”  Steve had thought that with the war over civilians wouldn’t have to live like this anymore.  That he was wrong feels like a failure.

“Buck up and buy some lamb,” Natasha says, and pushes him forward.

The man insists on giving them their food for free, even when Steve orders three lamb combo platters.  He eats the first one standing up, face practically buried in the styrofoam container.  Rescue — Tony — it’s difficult, not knowing which name to think — lands heavily beside him.  “I’ve called the car.  Wait for it on eleventh, okay?”

Tony’s going to fly home alone, Steve realizes, feeling suddenly miserable.  Rescue used to let him hitch a ride with her, even though it meant she had to go slower so he didn’t get windburned.  Looks like they’re not going to do that anymore.  Steve gets to wait for the car with everyone else.

“Ton — Rescue,” Steve says, holding out a hand, “Can I talk to you when we get back?”

Rescue tilts her head at him, mask unreadable as always.  For the first time, Steve can imagine the expressive face behind it.  It’s even more frustrating, now that he knows what he can’t see.  “Of course,” comes the reply, mechanical and flat.

Steve works his way, more slowly, through the second lamb platter in the back seat on the ride home to the mansion.

***

Jarvis sends Steve to the upstairs master bathroom to talk to Tony.  “Don’t worry, he is perfectly decent,” Jarvis assures, when Steve pauses outside.

Maybe Steve can talk to Tony later.  It’s not urgent, actually, he just wanted to make sure Tony didn’t vanish off to California or Spain or wherever he goes before Steve got a chance to see him.

“Steve, don’t _linger_ , I know you’re out there, I can feel you fucking fretting with your stupid hands behind your back and it’s giving me hives, come in,” Tony’s demanding voice says from through the door.  Steve unclasps his hands from behind his back and tries to make them feel natural at his sides.

The second floor bathroom that Steve uses is big, but this bathroom is bigger.  There’s a separate alcove for the toilet, and a big sunken-in tub in the middle of the floor.  There’s computers in here too, blue lights glowing beneath the mirrors, as if Tony designs things at the same time he brushes his teeth.  Steve supposes he probably does.  There’s a _chair_ by the bathtub.  Steve hasn’t ever seen a chair in a bathroom — why would a bathroom have a chair?

Tony isn’t in the chair.  He’s perched up on one of the counters, with the entire contents of his medical cabinet spread out around him.  The medicine cabinet is extensive.  Steve supposes Tony’s been doing his own medical care for a while.

Tony is shirtless, twisting around to look at himself in the mirror, checking his bandages.  The armor’s chest plate gleams above a mess of bandages and gauze, the bold colors incongruous against the soft lighting of the bathroom.  “I think I pulled the stitching out of one of the drainage tubes, that’s gross,” Tony grouses.  “I’m going to have to re-do all of this.”

Tony starts to painfully peel away bandages.  “I can help you with that,” Steve offers.

“I would — ah, ow, _ow_ , this adhesive is _shit_ — rather you not,” Tony says sharply.  “If it’s all the same to you.”

Tony has to reach his arms behind his back to get the last edge of the bandages unstuck.  It pulls at a bruise on his hip and Steve wants to wince in sympathy.  Tony doesn’t have any healing factor.  He’s just a person.  He must have taken some hits what Steve didn’t notice, because he looks worse than he did when he got out of the hospital, and he didn’t look great then.  Tony shouldn’t have been out in the field.

“I look that bad, huh?” Tony asks, scanning Steve’s face.  “I had eight inches of rebar removed from my side; I promise this is significantly improved.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t visit you,” Steve says.

Tony gives him a measuring look.  “Apology accepted.  I would have just yelled at you anyway.”

“I think yelling at me would have made you feel better.”

“Oh yes,” Tony says with a wistful sigh.  “Absolutely.”

“So…” Steve says slowly, “I suppose you didn’t have time to re-work the armor before the fight came up.”

Tony makes a non-committal grunt, lifting his arm to apply ointment to the still-raw surgical scars on his side.  “Don’t know what to tell you, pumpkin, I’ve been a little waylaid lately.  I mean, yeah, sure, the micro explosives could use some targeting work, but on a scale of one to ten, I’m not at my best.”

“No, I meant — it can’t stay like it is, right?”

Tony sighs.  “I’m a futurist, Rogers, nothing I touch stays like it is.  You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

“Well, Rescue looks like a woman.  And you’re a man.”

In the mirror, Steve watches Tony’s eyes widen in shock and anger.

“And why the _fuck_ would I change that?” Tony asks.  He looks like he might hit Steve, but instead he coughs, raw and shallow.  The muscles in his neck tighten as he suppresses any further signs whatever’s going awry in his body.

“I just — in a fight — I don’t know how to think of you.  As Tony or as, um, her.”

Tony takes a deep breath through his nose.  “Rescue is a woman, Tony Stark is a man, I’m both of them.  That’s how to think about it.  You don’t have to like it, Steve, but you’re going to have to live with it.”

Steve shakes his head.  “But why?”

“Breasts are _such_ a great place to store extra explosives,” Tony says dryly.

“Seriously.”

“It doesn't have to be complicated, Steve,” Tony says, and he doesn’t sound mad anymore, he just sounds tired.  “At first it was so people wouldn’t guess I was the person in the suit.  Then I liked it, and, hell, I’m already queer, might as well go whole hog.  Surely I’m not the first superhero who fights in drag.”

“I miss her a lot,” Steve admits, and slumps into Tony’s bathroom-chair.  Maybe this is the point of it, so that Tony can entertain sad super soldiers next to his ostentatious bathtub.

Tony’s posture shifts, just a little, and for the first time Steve lets himself see Rescue in Tony.  “I’m right here,” he says, still so tired.

Steve laughs, because it’s so _absurd_ , that the best and worst things about the future are bundled into one person.  “I guess I still owe you that milkshake, then,” he says.

Tony laughs too.  “Well then, darling, I think I’d like that.”

Tony makes it sound like a date and Steve didn’t mean it like that.  It’s okay, because Tony does this to everyone, too intimate across the board for it to ever mean anything.

Steve remembers Rescue’s lipstick on the straw of a milkshake.   _Tony_ was wearing lipstick then, and for some reason the thought makes Steve want to _look._ Tony isn’t paying attention.  He’s dabbing with a washcloth at a trickle of blood where he busted out a stitch in the fight, frowning at it with his lips pursed, and Steve thinks _lipstick_ and his face heats up, and he knows he’s blushing all the way down to his collar.  Tony’s wearing soft sweatpants slung low across his hips, and Steve lets his gaze slide up Tony’s toned stomach, over the sleek armor that covers his chest, to his neck, his jaw, his focused profile.

Tony tips his chin up, stretches the long column of his throat, glances at Steve under lidded eyes.  He’s showing off, enjoying Steve’s eyes on him, and this time Steve doesn’t have an excuse, Tony didn’t start anything, he was just _sitting there_ and if Steve asked Tony if he wanted help with the bandages now he thinks Tony might say yes and —

Steve likes _women_ , he looks at women, he liked Rescue but Rescue is a woman so that was okay even if he never saw her under the armor, just her personality and her jokes and Steve needs to leave.  Right now.

“It’s going to be okay,” Tony says gently.  “I remember what it’s like, when you’re afraid to think about it.”

“I’m not afraid,” Steve says reflexively, because Captain America doesn’t get afraid.  He’s jumped on grenades and off of buildings and into every battle that’s opened up before him like a crevasse yawning open in front of him, splitting the ground.  He doesn’t know what Tony thinks he’s talking about.

“Yeah you are,” Tony says, because Tony always thinks he’s right and won’t listen to anyone telling him otherwise.  “Scram, Captain, you look like you need a little space.”

Steve nods mutely, and leaves Tony to lick his wounds in peace.

***

Tony holds Steve to the milkshake thing.  He catches Steve after his run and instructs him to meet him in the foyer in half an hour.  “Brunch!” he says.  “You promised!”

Steve takes a deep breath.  He’s going to be normal about this.  He really does feel bad about not visiting Tony, and he doesn’t want Tony to think he’s a bigot.  Brunch will be good.

Tony meets him in a navy button-down and obnoxious rose-tinted sunglasses.  He looks — fine.  Just fine.  He moves a little stiffly, still feeling his injury, but he’s hidden it just as well as he’s hidden the chest plate that keeps his heart going.

“Doesn’t the arc reactor glow?” Steve asks.  He’s seen it, at the mansion, now that Tony doesn’t have to hide.  It shines through fabric, round and blue, wherever Tony goes.  It’s been bothering him, how Tony was keeping that under wraps.

“It shuts,” Tony says, and smacks his palm to his chest to demonstrate.  Under his shirt, a hexagonal aperture opens over the reactor.  Tony smacks it again and it closes once more.  “By preference, obviously, I like to be able to see the light.  Reassures me that I’m still ticking.”

That wasn’t obvious to Steve at all.  He hasn’t thought a lot about Tony’s heart.   _Don’t touch the chest plate, Steve, I’ll die, my heart’s torn up inside, I mean it,_ and Tony had looked so afraid, bleeding out under Steve’s hands, right after Steve didn't listen to him about taking off the armor the first time around.  Maybe it’s more that he hasn’t let himself think about Tony’s heart.

Tony takes them out for Italian espresso and brunch.  “Very American, Italian brunch, but you’ll be hungry if you just eat a pastry and I want affogato, so authenticity can’t be a priority.”

“What’s fair trade coffee?” Steve asks after they order, flipping the menu over to see if there’s anything on the back that explains.

“Morally pure coffee.  Exploitation-free at all levels of the supply train,” Tony explains.  “It’s hard to research for yourself to make sure companies aren’t using slave labor at some point in the process, so now there’s a sticker.”

That makes sense.  Steve likes that idea.  “Seems like a lot of companies hide bad things in one of the steps along the way, these days.”

“To the global age!” Tony says, raising his mug of coffee.  “Everything still comes from somewhere, but now you don’t have to see it.”

Tony’s quiet for a second, and then he points at Steve with two fingers.  Then he points again, more emphatically. “Wait wait wait, doombots.  They’re made of metal, right?”

“Yes,” Steve says carefully, not sure if a question that obvious requires an answer.

“Lots of metal!  Yes!  I’m an idiot for not seeing this before and a genius for thinking of it now, typical.”  Tony digs around in his pockets for his phone, still talking.  It’s like he’s forgotten Steve entirely.  “I think I left the spectroscopy equipment in the mansion workshop, definitely have bits of doombot.”

Steve snatches Tony’s fair trade coffee to save it from Tony’s elbow as he holds out his phone and expands it into a two-foot-wide holographic screen with spread fingers.  “I wonder what the rarest element in that alloy is, no, better to cross-reference all of the components anyway, getting specific ratios should rule out a lot of generic secret military manufacturing goings-on.  Should have the portable x-ray fluorescence rig in the mansion workshop, easy, easy, what’s next.  Mines.  Shipping.  You can always catch them on logistics, Steve, that’s where they get sloppy.”

Tony blinks, coming out of the babble a little, still clicking through search results with one hand but seemingly aware that he’s in public again.  “Right, you're still here, human beings, I should act like one.  Rain check on the rest of brunch, honeybun, I need to follow this,” he says, shooting Steve what seems like a genuinely regretful smile.

“Eat my food when it comes,” Tony instructs, waving two fifty dollar bills in front of Steve’s face until he takes them.  It’s too much for their brunch, but Steve doesn’t think Tony is going to listen if he mentions that.  The waitress will get a good tip, at least.  “Or, hey, actually, _Pepper._  That’s a great idea, Jarvis, dial Pepper.”

Finally, Steve thinks, someone is using their telephone as a telephone.

“Hey, I need a favor, no, hey, let me finish!  You’ll like it!  I need you to entertain Captain America for brunch.  Right now.  I’m not — please, Pepper, Pep, Pepperoni, ouch, okay, not calling you Pepperoni, that was a bad call, I remember last time — ugh, Steve, _you_ tell her,” Tony says, holding the phone out.  “Pepper’s lovely to have brunch with, much better than me.”

“Hello, Ms. Potts,” Steve says, feeling very bullied.

“Hello to you too, Captain.  It’s really you.  I’m so sorry, it’s just, Tony —“

“Nothing to apologize for,” Steve says.

“Great, you’re going to get along great, bye,” Tony says, clapping his hands together in triumph and getting up from the table.  Steve tries to hand the phone back before Tony vanishes, but he waves it off.  “Keep the phone, I have extras.”

A black town car pulls up to the curb and Tony vanishes into it, twinkling his fingers at Steve in a cheery goodbye.

Pepper arrives just as their food does, carrying work with her just the way Tony does.  Unlike Tony, she stows it away when she sits down and gives Steve her full attention.  She’s practiced at it, and Steve expects that she spends a lot of time in meetings making men feel like she’s putting serious thought into every one of their ideas.

She raises an eyebrow when the waiter drops off their affogato, two little trays carrying chilled glasses of vanilla gelato and miniature pitchers of espresso next to them.

Steve sighs.  “I promised Tony a milkshake, and he decided this was close enough.  I’m sorry for taking up your time.”

Pepper shakes her head.  “It’s nice to get out of the office.”

Pepper radiates competence like a small, efficient star.  Her version of small talk is swift and engrossing, and Steve lets her take the lead throughout their chat.  After he’s cleared his plate Steve realizes he’s just received a comprehensive primer on the inner workings of Stark Industries.  

Pepper is more than Tony’s assistant.  “What’s your _actual_ job?” he asks, trying to find better footing.

“Everything, basically,” Pepper says easily.  “Did you pick out a painting yet?  Tony’s been pestering me, he says he has practically blank white walls now that he’s taken down all the portraits of you.”

“Um,” Steve says.

He needs a minute to process this information.

Pepper maintains a level stare while Steve tries to wrap his head around _portraits of you_.  Steve gets the feeling that in every moment of silence she’s gleaning more from his face.

“You mean a great deal to him,” Pepper says eventually.

“I — I liked Jasper Johns,” Steve says, fleeing to the relative safety of the fantastically expensive painting Tony is trying to buy for him.  This is impossible.  “He painted the shield — my shield — a lot of times,” Steve says, and it’s egotistical to say that but he liked it, liked knowing that he’d had an impact on the art world even while he was gone.

Pepper smiles like she’s happy with his choice.  “We have some Johns already in the Stark Collection.  No shields, unfortunately.”

“That’s good, actually.  I don’t want to be vain.”

“You aren’t,” Pepper reassures him.  “I’ll have them taken out of storage.”

***

Tony vanishes for 36 hours, then re-emerges in the suit as Rescue.

“Is there a call to assemble?” Steve asks when she comes up the stairs from the workshop.  “I didn’t get anything.”

Rescue lands heavily, less graceful than usual.  The floor creaks dangerously under her boots.  “No, press conference.  The — um — police commissioner, also the mayor, also the fire department, are tired of doombots showing up in Williamsburg and trashing the place and want to pass the buck.  We’re the buck today, whoop-dee-doo.”

Her voice is slower than usual, lacking some of the snappy wit Steve is accustomed to.  “Are you okay?”

“M’fine.  Not drunk,” Rescue says.  “Got a coding hangover from making a Doom-finder.  Still not working.”

“And you’re going to do a press conference _alone?_ ” Steve asks, because that seems like a bad idea.  He doesn’t add that he thinks Rescue’s not at her full capacity because he doesn’t feel like having the inevitable fight.

“What, you want to come with?” Rescue retorts.

“Did you eat or sleep at all since you didn’t eat brunch with me?” Steve asks, and wishes the last part didn’t sound so petulant.

“Yes — no — God, it’s hard to lie to you, you have this whole — face — thing that you do.”

Rescue is definitely not running at top speed, and Steve doubts she’s going to admit it unless Steve really wants to push the issue.  “When’s the press conference?” he asks instead.

She shrugs, kicking her boot against the floor.  It leaves a dent.  “Ten minutes? Ish?  I’m going to have to fly there -- too slow otherwise.  At least the suit means I don’t have to do hair and makeup.  I think I have engine oil in my beard.”

 _That_ is a test, and Steve is determined not to fail.  When he puts his mind to it, Steve can stare down anything without flinching.  And if the mental contrast of Rescue’s metal curves with Tony’s tidy goatee makes Steve feel strange and unsettled deep in his gut, he can hide that.

“Then I’m flying too,” Steve says.  “I’m not letting you do this unsupervised.”

Rescue looks up at him, tilting her head, then holds out a hand.  Steve steps up onto the tops of her boots, then wraps an arm around her rigid shoulders and tucks his face into her chest to protect it from windburn.  She must be genuinely tired, to let him come along without any additional protest.

“Good?” Rescue asks.

“As long as I’m not expected to look like I just came out of hair and makeup when we arrive.”

“Darling, you’re perfect,” Rescue says, cradling his head with one gauntlet to protect it.  She takes off using just three repulsors, showing off, then wobbles.  Rescue swears, mutters some thrust variable adjustments to the armor’s operating system, and zips them off.

Steve didn’t really expect that Rescue would land them directly behind the podium on the steps of the firehouse, but that’s what she does.  Rescue doesn’t do things by halves.

A cacophony of voices rises as Steve steps off of Rescue’s feet and pushes back his cowl.  Steve settles one hand on the small of Rescue’s back, and raises the other to quiet everyone down.  Steve puts the power of Captain America in his gaze, which has stilled more riotous folks.

Feedback shrieks from the cluster of microphones affixed to the podium, making Rescue jump.  She recovers and twists all the microphones up and away from the suit’s speakers.  A kid wearing a headset makes an agonized noise as Rescue rearranges the sound equipment to her liking.

“Sound engineering, guys, please, what is this dad rock garage band nonsense?  This is better, how’s everyone feeling, testing, testing, one two, delightful.  Batter up, who’s first?”

Lots of hands shoot up, and the reporters jostle forward.  Steve glares some more and they back off.

“You,” Rescue says, pointing.

“How do you justify the burden on the taxpayer caused by property damage in the past six months of robot incursions?”

Rescue holds up two fingers.  “One, Stark Industries subsidizes clean-up efforts significantly.  Two, holding us responsible for property damages is like holding the coast guard responsible for a hurricane.  You have your causalities all mixed up, pal.”

Steve winces when the reporter leans in like she’s smelled blood in the water.  Rescue’s metaphor isn’t quite watertight.  “But, you’d have to agree that hurricanes don’t choose their targets with intent, or hold grudges against specific persons.”

Steve leans into the microphone before Rescue can defend her figure of speech.  “Our primary function as the Avengers is to minimize damage and civilian casualties.  I believe we have been largely successful.”

This mollifies her, and a weedy man with round glasses takes the next question.  “Are Rescue and Captain America romantically involved?”

Steve blanches and double-checks his posture.  Was he standing too close to Rescue?  Do the reporters know something he doesn’t?  Is he not supposed to touch her back and — oh no — how much worse would this question be if they knew Tony was inside the armor?

In his ear, the private coms line hisses open and Tony’s voice crackles in his ear. “Stop scowling, Cap, this is bog-standard tabloid sexism at work.  I’m used to it.”  Steve didn’t realize he was frowning.  He pulls his face into a smile.

“Ohhh, no, that’s much worse,” Tony says.  “Go back to the scowl, you look like someone coated your teeth with vaseline and told you if your lips touched each other you’d get court-martialed.”

Rescue switches back to external speakers and leans threateningly over the podium.  “Micah, you’re very charming and that question is stupid.  You’ve asked it about Hawkeye, Thor, Doctor Strange, and _Spiderman_.  Who is a teenager.  Next question had better be about robots again, dears,” she says.

They make a good team as the questions bounce off of them.  Steve convinces the crowd to trust them, and Rescue makes jokes.  She’s punchy and scattered, but the reporters don’t seem surprised.  For about twenty minutes, there are no surprises. 

“When are the regular robot assaults going to stop?”

“We don’t have an answer to that,” Steve says placidly.

“Actually, there won’t be any more,” Rescue says, suddenly vehement.  

That is not the right way to answer this question.  Steve can’t help by coming along if Rescue’s going to make wild claims in front of reporters.  Steve grabs Rescue’s wrist and squeezes hard enough that the armor creaks under his fingers.  He can’t make the face he wants to, so instead he gives Rescue a small shake.  

“I have a lead,” Tony’s voice says in Steve’s ear.  “Don’t freak out.”  The press conference falls apart after that because Steve decides they’re done and drags Rescue off the stage.

“That went well,” Rescue says, chipper.

Steve raises his eyebrows.

“Sweetheart, you should have seen the one I gave while bleeding into my boots.  I was up to my ankles by the end of it.  That was a riot.”

Steve almost chokes on his own tongue trying not to react to that revelation.

“Oh, don’t be like that, it wasn’t _that_ much blood.  I was mostly worried about springing a leak.”

Steve sighs. “We’re going to be dragged over the coals if those doombots show up again.”

“They won’t.  My idea is going to work,” Rescue says.  “Let’s go home.”

***

Even though he’s gotten comfortable with the day-to-day technology of the present, Steve still feels the gaps in his knowledge acutely.  The history was relatively easy, because it was all about people, and Steve knows people.  However, there’s a lot of scientific advances that he finds more difficult.

Steve checked out a book called _The Human Music Box: Our Mechanical Biology_ and has been slogging through it for the past two weeks.  He’s worked his way through DNA, and something about duplicating sheep (which was much more laborious than he feels was necessary, given there’s plenty of super villains who would be happy to duplicate whatever you wanted, although they mostly create horrible monsters).  There’s a whole chapter on mutants that makes Steve feel strangely uneasy.

He wonders if his DNA is different, too. The scientists who created this body for him did it without the benefit of all this knowledge.  Steve can’t imagine how they did it, stabbing in the dark; they must have been so unsure what they were doing to him.  It makes anger clench in his chest, how much he had trusted them in their positions of authority.  He wouldn’t tell them no, even now.  It was worth it for his country.

There’s _vaccines_ now.  Lord, nobody gets measles any longer.  And still — they can’t make more of him.  It’s a little bit of a miracle.  Steve lays a hand over his chest, breathes in deep, out again, and there’s no stabbing hitch in his breath, everything in his lungs is smooth and good, and it’s still a surprise.  He’s okay.  He’s perfect now.

But they missed something; they couldn’t scrub out his desire for men.

Because he wants Tony, doesn’t he?  Steve wishes he could be more uncertain.  But it’s as clear as the calculation he makes when he’s looking across a gap and he knows he can jump it.  It’s like trusting that his shield will come back to his hand.

Has this always been there?  He thinks back to Bucky, with his big cocky smile and stinking pomade, and all he feels is grief.  They had been friends, they’d hugged and slapped shoulders and one time, even, Bucky kissed his cheek, laughing and joking when Steve fretted too much over the risks of a mission.   _Oh Stevie, come back to me after the war,_ Bucky had crooned, and Steve had pushed him away, annoyed but still laughing, with none of the gut-deep vulnerable fear Steve feels around Tony.  If Tony kissed him on the cheek, would Steve be able to resist turning his face into Tony’s cheek, breathing in deep next to his ear to smell expensive cologne and paint thinner and grease?

He’d always been jealous of the chorus girls when they slipped off with a honey.  They whispered among each other, passed around the one pair of nylons that they all shared, pinched their cheeks to redden them, then dragged a GI off to kiss.  Steve’d thought he just wanted someone to like him like that, suffering usual yearning for human intimacy, 

Now he thinks it was messier than that.  He’s not sure who he imagined being, when he watched them vanish behind the stage.  Was it the soldiers sliding their hands up smooth thighs, rucking up skirts and returning with lipstick-stained jaws, or was it the girls leaning into strong chests, running light fingers along the cool metal of a belt buckle, softening under a man’s rough hands?  Maybe he wanted to be both of them.

Steve would like to go back to his book.  He angrily turns a page, realizes he hasn’t retained a single sentence of it, and flips back.   _In 1995 two competing groups, one private and one government funded, began the attempt to assemble a complete human genome.  The strategies of each_ — it’s too boring.  He needs a different strategy.  He can push this feeling down, drown it out with thoughts of women.  Steve likes the sway of hips when a woman walks by, and he likes watching them put on makeup, mouths and breasts and the wonderful wet slide between a woman’s legs.  He’d been reluctant to do much before marriage, but fingers were fine, and safe for both of them.  A man wouldn’t be like that, slick and hot, easy with desire for him.

Tony’s hips sway too, and his mouth is red and wet.  Steve closes his eyes and imagines his fingers sliding between Tony’s lips, past Tony’s sharp teeth to meet his tongue, and _oh god_ he _wants_ that, he can’t get away from it.

 _It’s hard when you’re scared just to think about it_ , Tony had said, and he had been right.

Steve grits his teeth and considers taking a cold shower.  Maybe he should get a more interesting book.

It would be a hell of a thing if Tony wore red lace under his clothes all the time.  Steve had only seen a narrow strip of it, but there must have been so much more.  Steve pictures Tony hammering metal in his workshop, shirtless except for the flimsy bralette stretching delicately across his flexing muscles.  It’s a painfully arousing image.

If he’d come across Tony in a bar, one of the seedy ones in France during the war, he could have slid up beside him and offered a drink.  In his mind Tony’s gender slides back and forth, a deep honey voice, hard muscles, a form-fitting dress in the same cherry red as Rescue’s armor.  Steve does like red.  As Steve paid for his drink Tony would say, _hello sailor,_ and Steve wouldn’t even protest that he was in the Army, lean in as Tony whispered in his ear, _come on outside, darling, I want someone to keep me warm while I have a smoke._

Steve could brush Tony’s fingers, just with the back of his hand, and Tony would take the hint and take his hand while they slipped out toward the back of the bar.   _Do you need a light?_ Steve would ask _,_ and Tony would answer, _no, I traded my cigarettes for lipstick and liquor was always my sin of choice anyway,_ and Steve would wrap his hands around Tony’s waist, marvel as how much of Tony he could cover at a time, dig his thumbs just a little into the soft place just below Tony’s ribs.

He thinks of Tony’s dark, dark eyes, big and smoked with kohl, and strong calloused fingers around the back of Steve’s neck, thinks of kissing, soft dry presses interrupted by close shared breaths and Steve could force Tony to be still, press him against a wall and hold him there, in the present, slow his mind down until all he was thinking of was _Steve_ , only Steve.  Steve is going to grip Tony tight and make him _stay._

And then the image of shirtless Tony in his workshop again, and Tony sees him, puts down his hammer and advances on Steve like a predator, and Steve is so happy to be prey. Tony turns him into something soft and open, Tony pushes Steve up against the door of a glossy muscle car and tips Steve’s head back, bites his neck, and Steve is making small aching noises into his lonely room. Tony has him, has Steve right where he wants him and it’s where Steve wants to be.

The book has fallen off of Steve’s lap and flipped itself closed, losing his place.  In his pants his cock is heavy and full, and he’s been running his hand mindlessly up and down his chest, and it feels nice, really nice.  Steve pulls his hand away and sets it firmly on the sheets.  No.

 _Go away_ , Steve thinks firmly at his boner.   _Go away right now!_

It doesn’t listen to him.

Even if Steve does want Tony, it doesn’t matter.  Tony doesn’t want him back.  He’s turned Steve down three times: the first time he asked Rescue, then again because he couldn’t deal with Steve being a homophobe, and finally at the press conference when that reporter was stupid enough to ask if they were involved.

Steve was already trying to erase his crush on Rescue, now he just has to do that with Tony as well.  It’ll be fine.  Steve will stop wanting Tony, and then he’ll stop wanting men, and the problem will be solved.

***

Steve is sitting out in the lawn, having an early evening beer (he can’t get drunk, but sometimes the taste is comforting) when he sees the bright streak of Rescue departing.

Without thinking about it, Steve’s phone is in his hand and he’s running for his room in the mansion, already calling.  He needs his shield, which is in his closet, and his uniform, which is folded up on the chair by the bed.  

“Where are you going?” Steve snaps.

“Nowhere, business trip, nothing special,” Tony says, and he’s using the Rescue voice, which is a low, dirty trick, he knows Steve trusts Rescue more than he trusts Tony, even now.  Rescue is a cool head in a fight, and Tony is an idiot.

“ _Rescue,_ ” Steve says sharply, using the Captain America voice, the one that makes Tony blush if he uses it outside of a combat situation.  “Do not lie to me.”

Rescue groans, contrail starting to vanish into the clouds on the horizon, and says, “Following up that lead.  It’s more of a solo-thing, and I don’t want to be embarrassed if it doesn’t pan out.  Which is likely.  Go back to your beer.”

Steve frowns, feeling thunderous, but he slows his sprint, then stops, lingering at the top of the stairs.  “You have six hours, and then I’m coming after you.”

“Fine,” Rescue spits out with bad grace.  “I’ll be back by curfew.  And darling?  Don’t wait up.”

“Six hours, Rescue,” Steve warns.  He pushes open the door to his room, slamming the door too hard, and starts putting on his uniform anyway.  He rationalizes that if Rescue needs him, he wants to be ready at a moment’s notice to go after her.  But really, Rescue is damnably proud, and Steve doesn’t think she’ll call.  This is purely to make Steve feel better.

Steve spends the next four hours with the secure Avengers app open on his phone, watching the tiny dot that marks Tony’s location move.  Clint tries to get him to stop pacing and eat dinner but Steve waves him off.  

“Tony does this pretty often,” Natasha says behind him, making Steve jump.  “He’s very capable, both as Rescue and as himself.”

“I just don’t like it,” Steve grouches.  The green dot has been in the same little square for more than thirty minutes.  “Look, he hasn’t moved.”

Natasha doesn’t look at the digital map he holds out.  “Steve,” she says, and Steve knows that she _knows_ , and he goes red.  It was one thing for her to know about his interest in Rescue, but it’s another thing entirely for her to know about him and Tony.  Steve wants to trust her, and yet — he can’t help thinking about leverage.  Steve’s read about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and even that is gone now.  They can’t discharge him for being — whatever he is.  There’s a palpable gap in Steve’s mind as he tries to come up for a word for what he is and gets nothing but insults and newfangled vocabulary that he can’t connect to.

It’s silly; she can’t hold something perfectly legal over him, but it still _feels_ like potential blackmail, and Natasha is still a spy.   

“I’m going,” Steve says, because he can’t be still any longer.

“Not by yourself, you aren’t,” Clint says.  “Thor is already in the quinjet.  We’ve been waiting for you to crack for the past two hours.”

Steve slings his shield onto his back, too relieved to be annoyed that the rest of the team anticipated him so completely.  “I think he’s found the source of the doombots,” Steve says.  “He was coding up a Doom-finder based on…something.  He wasn’t doing a good job explaining.”

“Following the supply lines,” Natasha says, not slowing on her way up to the jet.  “All those rare metals have to come from somewhere, and there are a limited number of applications for that much iridium and holmium.”

Steve frowns at her, not sure how she knows all that.  “I’ve bugged the workshop, and Tony talks to himself,” she explains, like recording people in their homes is entirely routine.  For her, Steve supposes it is.  Steve’s suddenly very glad that he only uses his room to read and sleep.

“Let us go bring back our errant lamb,” Thor declares, and they’re off.  Steve tightens his jaw and assures himself that it’s nothing.

***

Tony’s location leads them to a huge abandoned chemical plant, the kind out in the middle of nowhere, far away from anyone’s backyard, a kind of self-sufficient compound surrounded by warehouses and office buildings and the ramshackle leftovers of on-site housing.  It’s going to be hell to search through it all, but the locator isn’t fine-tuned enough to give them better than an approximate read on Tony’s whereabouts.

Thor takes the catwalks around the towering chemical silos, Clint and Natasha the production floor, and Steve takes the warehouse and associated sheds.

He knows he’s getting close to something when he starts running into locked doors and remote-activated turrets.  He makes short work of the heat-seeking guns; one strike from the shield bends them into scrap.  The warehouse is split into a maze of narrow passages and cluttered storage rooms.  Steve strikes through the hinges of any door that stands in his way, searching one by one.

It’s not as empty as the bunker he and Rescue searched before, but it’s still eerily quiet.

He kicks in another door and sees a glint of gold and candy-apple red.

The Rescue suit lies fully assembled and dead on the floor of the storage room.  That explains why the area was more firmly sealed up.  The armor is a good catch, and without it Tony, wherever he is, is a lot less dangerous.  It needs to move.  When Steve finds Tony he wants the suit available and, ideally, not where their foes expect it.

Steve gets his hands wedged under the suit’s armpits.  He hauls upwards and the armor is unexpectedly rigid.  All the servos have seized up instead of going loose the way they usually do when the suit is powered down.  It’s heavier like this, which is unexpected.  A floppy dead weight should be harder to lift; worse leverage.  Rescue is still heavy, and Steve has to put his shoulder into it — it’s going to be difficult to move like this, a fireman’s carry is out of the question — 

There’s a hoarse noise from inside the suit.  Steve almost drops it in shock.  That’s why it’s so heavy.

Tony is in the suit.

Tony is in the suit and the suit can’t move.

Whoever was here when Tony arrived was ready for him, and they did something to the suit to trap Tony inside.  It must be like being in the ice.  Restrained all around, in the dark, hardly able to breathe.  Steve’s heart feels like it wants to pound itself out of his chest.  That can’t happen to Tony, Steve has to get him out.  Steve lays the frozen suit back down on the ground, as gently as he can, and puts his hands carefully on either side of the helmet.

“I’m so sorry, so sorry, Rescue, Tony, I have to open the suit.  I can’t hear you say it’s okay but I can’t leave you in there,” Steve says in a rush, as loudly as he dares.  “I’m sorry.”  This time even if he did know where the release mechanisms in the suit were Steve doubts that they’d open for him with the suit in this shape.  He digs his fingers into the groove of the faceplate and pulls.  It’s harder this time, with everything seized up.  Steve feels one of his fingernails start to break.  He resettles his grip and _wrenches_ and it finally gives.

Tony’s face is streaked with tears, both fresh and dry.  He gasps in the fresh air.  Steve wants to put his hands all over him to remind him that things can be warm.

“Steve, baby, you found me,” Tony says in a broken rasp.  Steve doesn’t understand why his voice sounds so terrible until Tony looks into his face and answers the question without Steve even having to articulate it.  “Screamed myself hoarse about an hour ago, I think.”

“How do I get you the rest of the way free?” Steve asks.

“Do you have a screwdriver?” Tony croaks.  “No?  Good thing you’re strong, darling.”

Tony tells Steve to crack the suit open at the wrists first, so he can move his hands.  As soon as they’re free, Tony flexes his fingers into a fist, then open again, over and over.  When Steve glances towards his face Tony is crying again, starting to hyperventilate.  He’s panicking.  That’s understandable, but Steve needs him cogent to help take the suit off.

Steve finds one of Tony’s hands with his own.  “Squeeze,” he orders.  Tony’s grip tightens like a vise.  “Now breathe with me.”

Tony’s wide dark eyes find Steve’s, and he nods a little.  He can only move his head about a half an inch in either direction.  Horror slices through Steve again, but he has to be calm for Tony, has to get him through this.  Steve breathes in, deep, keeping his eyes on Tony’s, holding it until Tony breathes in too.  Then he lets the air out, watching Tony do the same.  Tony starts to lose it, hiccups a little, air whistling in-out one, two, three times, his gaze turning vacant.

“Hey! Eyes on me,” Steve says, and Tony brings himself back, swallowing down the sobs.  Steve squeezes his hand, then rubs his thumb across Tony’s knuckles.  “Good man.  Deep breath, one more, for me, okay?”

Tony breathes.  The rest of the helmet comes off next, then the arms, shoulders, hips, thighs and knees.  Tony has to stop every few pieces to calm down with Steve.

Finally there’s only the chest plate left.  Steve stops.  “Take it off,” Tony begs, wrenching at himself.  “I’ll plug myself into the wall, I don’t want it to touch me, _please_.”

When he’s finally free of it all, Tony curls into the wall, wires trailing from his chest to the hole Steve punched through the concrete, small and shaking in just his black under-suit.

Carefully, Steve settles down next to Tony with his back to the wall.  He stretches his legs out in front of him and tugs on Tony, pulling on his unresisting limbs until he’s bundled into Steve’s lap.  Tony’s hands fist in Steve’s shirt and he can feel Tony trying to sync his breathing with Steve again.  His face falls into the crook of Steve’s neck, damp with tears and sweat.

“That was awful,” Tony says hoarsely.

Steve strokes Tony’s back, long slow passes from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine.  Tony’s skin jumps and shivers under his hands, but Steve keeps at it, touching him all over until the muscles underneath loosen into something less like steel, something that better approximates flesh.

Clint and Natasha kick the door in, scanning the room gun and bow first, before landing on Steve and Tony collapsed on the ground.

“Armor locked up with him inside it,” Steve explains quietly.  “Hell of a way to torture a man.”  _I should know_ , Steve doesn’t add.  He doesn’t want anyone else to think of the ice.

“We’ve got bogies out there,” Clint says, glancing at the door.  Slowly Steve becomes aware of the noises outside, hisses and bangs, not getting louder but not retreating either.  His focus had narrowed so far that there had only been the armor, and Tony’s breath, and his own.  “They’d mostly cleaned out but Thor has a pocket of them pinned down.”

Tony pushes himself up from from Steve’s chest.  “Go fight,” he says.  “I’m useless without Rescue.”

“No,” Steve says, not moving.

“Cap,” Natasha snaps.  “Come on.”

“I won’t leave him,” Steve snarls, protective rage flaring in his chest.  If anything comes after Tony, Steve’s going to be here so he can tear it to pieces.

Clint and Natasha exchange an eloquent look, and then Natasha makes more knives appear out of nowhere.  Clint takes a moment to strap on a thigh holster and screw together a few more acid arrows.  They check each other over, cataloguing each other’s strengths like it’s second nature.  Clint nods mutely, and they’re prepared.

“We’ll mop this up,” Clint says.  “You can thank us later.”

***

Steve lets Tony cling to him for as long as he needs, which turns out to be about fifteen more minutes.  When that’s up, Tony rises, brushes off his knees, and sits down against the wall about a foot away from Steve.  He twists one of the wires stuck into his chest around a finger.  “Are you going to yell at me for going off alone?”

“No,” Steve says heavily.

“No?  What have you done with Cap, you bodysnatcher?”

Steve leans his head back, letting it thunk against the concrete.  “I don’t want to.  Not after — I just don’t want to.”

“Okay,” Tony says, surprisingly sedate.  “You really can go help the others, you know.  If anyone comes in I’ll brain them with a chunk of the suit.”

Steve clenches his jaw.  “Tony.  Leave it.”

Eventually, Tony slides a piece of armor over and starts fiddling with it, examining the places where Steve’s fingers bit into the edges and poking at the dead wiring.  Steve levers up and stations himself at the door, listening with half his attention on the hallway outside and half on the clink and scrape of Tony working.

When Clint, Thor and Natasha come back Natasha has a long slice along her arm.  She’s torn her sleeve off at the shoulder; it must have been flapping free and getting in her way.  Steve feels a stab of guilt — if he’d been there, his teammates wouldn’t have gotten hurt.  A few feet away, Tony shudders as he picks up the chest plate and clips himself back into it.  Steve re-evaluates.  Any choice he made was going to leave someone on his team wounded.

“All squared away,” Clint says, throwing Steve a sarcastic salute.

“Thank you,” Steve says.  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help.”

Clint rolls his eyes.  “It’s no fun when you say stuff like that and mean it.  You’re so earnest all the time, Cap, you’ve got to hold back a little.”

“What do we do with this place?” Natasha asks.

“Torch it,” Steve says.

“This is a big operation; Doom could come back here.  We might get another chance to catch him,” Natasha argues.

“Do it anyway,” Steve growls, and she nods.

***

The SHIELD de-brief is terrible. Sub-Director Hill chews Steve out for going off-mission for Rescue; in the next office Director Fury yells at Rescue for haring off alone. Rescue’s suited up in an older version of the armor; Steve tries not to worry.

“Are you okay?” Steve asks, putting a hand on Rescue’s shoulder. 

“Yeah, absolutely, fine,” she says, too fast.  “It’s great in here.”

Steve doesn’t believe her for one second. He steers them into an empty conference room and locks the door behind them. “Take a breather,” Steve orders. 

Rescue pulls her gauntlets off first, then uses her freed hands to unhook the helmet. Underneath Tony looks flushed and terrible. He licks his lips and rubs a hand through his hair. It sticks up in damp spikes.

“How do you do it?” Steve asks quietly. He can’t imagine being frozen again, not for anything.

Tony flips the helmet in his hands, then holds it out in Steve’s direction. “Here, put it on.”

Steve takes it gingerly, fumbling with the mechanism to open it until Tony guides his hands to the catches with gentle presses of his fingers. “I should teach you how this works,” he says, almost to himself. “Then you can stop breaking my stuff by peeling me out of it like an orange.  You absolute brute.“

Steve loves oranges. They used to be a Christmas treat, precious, and every year they had the money for it he’d split one with Bucky, savoring it section by section.  Now Steve can have them whenever he wants, but even abundance hasn’t numbed him to the joy of the first burst of sweetness every time.

Tony slips the helmet onto Steve’s head and the Rescue interface unfolds before him like a flower.  He has more peripheral vision than he’d have without the helmet on, laid over the illusion of a vast dark sea.  There’s a light breeze on his face, and everything smells like Tony.  “This is incredible,” Steve breathes, and the voice that comes through the external speakers is his but different, higher and smoother, like a woman’s.

“See, it’s not so bad,” Tony says, waving a hand in front of Steve’s face.  “Although you do look ridiculous, I _need_ a photograph.  Twitter must see.”

“No,” Steve says, still in a woman’s voice, but Tony is already pulling his phone out of his pocket, and without thinking Steve grabs him by the wrist.  Tony laughs and tries to get at the phone with his other hand, so Steve grabs that wrist too, then pulls Tony’s hands together in front of him, wrapping one hand around both (he can reach almost all the way around Tony’s wrists) so one hand is free to pull the helmet off.

Tony pouts, but doesn’t twist free.  Steve’s hold is loose — Tony could get away if he wanted.  The door is locked, and nobody can walk in on them.

Steve feels his heartbeat spike as the pulse in Tony’s wrists quickens.  Tony treats Steve to one of his slow, possessive glances.  “Do you want something, darling?”

_Yes.  I want to know if your mouth is hot or cool.  I want to know how much I like it._

Steve shakes his head to clear it, and Tony treats that as an answer.  He takes a measured step back.  Steve wants so badly to yank him close, touch the curves of the armor while he kisses Tony’s mouth.  He wants to smell Tony on himself when he leaves SHIELD HQ.  Tony would keep his secret, wouldn’t tell anyone that Steve wanted men too.  Tony wouldn’t rat Steve out to the papers; Steve would never find himself shirtless on the cover of the Daily Mail, undone in the eyes of the public.

But Tony has turned him down, and Steve won’t take something Tony doesn’t want to give.  Reluctantly, he lets go.  Tony takes the helmet back and settles it onto his head.  He slides the gauntlets back on and nods at Steve.  The moment is over.  Steve’s willpower held.  He should be glad.

***

The mansion’s kitchen in the morning has become one of Steve’s favorite places.  Natasha throws a knife across the room to Clint, which he catches easily and sets to cutting onions for their eggs.  Then Clint whips a ceramic mug at Steve’s head.  “Coffee up,” he says.  Steve catches it and glares at him, but his heart isn’t in it, and Clint just laughs and throws a spatula.

Tony sweeps in to join them.  He’s wearing a wine-colored robe, in stocking feet.  Tony wearing nylons sends a shock straight to Steve’s groin and he has to bite his tongue to keep from having a reaction that everyone might notice.

“You need a tux,” Tony announces, gesturing to Steve with a tip of his hand.

“And why’s that?” Steve asks flatly, reaching up to grab a second mug for Tony.  He pours coffee for both of them, then holds the larger out for Tony.  Tony looks down at it, wrinkles his nose, and snags a bottle of whiskey from above the fridge.  He adds a generous slug to the coffee, then takes a long drink and sighs in satisfaction.

“Mmmmmm, industry benefit event,” Tony says.  Steve scowls.  He hates those parties, and he doesn’t know how he feels about going out on Tony’s arm.  It feels awfully public.  Vulnerable.  “As teammates, hot stuff,” Tony reassures.  “I need your gorgeous muscles.”

Of course as teammates.  Steve was stupid to even be confused.  Tony touches everyone on the team these days, little things for no reason —  a hand on the shoulder, handshakes and cheek kisses and quick hugs hello.  Except for Steve. Unless there’s a need, Tony still dances around him.  With Steve, apparently, the no-touching rule extends past the chest plate. 

“Okay, chop chop, I can tell you’re going to say yes. Say yes. I’ll hold my breath until you say yes.”

“A _tux_ , really?” Steve groans, and Tony smiles brilliantly like he’s won a prize. Steve wonders idly if it’s the face he makes while Rescue flies.

“It’s black tie, sweetheart, you can’t exactly wear the Stars and Stripes.”

“I have a dress uniform,” Steve argues, and Tony’s eyes light up even brighter. 

“Oh, _yes_ , unbelievable, wear that. How many medals have they pinned to your perfect chest?  I bet there’s enough that I could melt them down and —“

Steve cuts him off. “Enough, Tony. You got what you wanted.”

Whatever obscene thing Tony wants to make from his decorations can remain a mystery. Steve wishes the Army had not given him _quite_ so many medals, but he’s not handing any over to Tony.

“Stop sexually harassing Steve,” Natasha says. “It’s too easy, you’re embarrassing yourself.”

“It’s fun,” Tony whines. “He likes it.”

“I do not!”  Steve says, and even before Natasha’s eloquently raised eyebrow, he knows he’s protested too much.

The look Tony shoots him almost melts Steve’s spine. It’s not fair that this is just a game to Tony. Steve remembers his plan: give it time and he’ll stop wanting Tony, and he can go back to being normal.

***

Nothing exciting happens in the week before Tony’s event.  Steve was surprised that Tony told him that far in advance, but apparently Tony had been serious about getting Steve a tuxedo that fit, and that took time.  Steve works out, reads, and only gets called out for superhero duty one time to save a stray dog that fell into a hole in a construction site.  Steve is pretty certain that his role in the dog rescue could have been played by some rope and a winch, but the dog licks his ears the whole time Steve is working her free, and it’s hard to be angry.  

The press is there, of course: animals and heroes are good, noncontroversial fare for any morning news segment.  Steve lets them take all the video they want, and tries not to think about the coverage he gets — _Captain Adorable: Super Dog Rescue_ — compared to all the things they print about Tony; _10 Tips to Net Your Own Playboy Billionaire, No Redemption for the Merchant of Death_ , _Click Here: this Stark Sex Scandal will Shock You!_

Steve’s almost glad to have something to do come Friday.  He re-reads the uniform code a few times, trying to catch up with the changes in the past decades.  He can forego the hat, but not the bow tie.  When he comes down the stairs, Clint wolf whistles at him.

Tony, sleek in a suit that’s so dark plum it’s almost black, hands Steve a chicken sandwich.  “Have this now,” he says.  “It’s gauche to eat more than five bites at these sorts of things, and you don’t want to be hungry.”

“I thought this was a dinner?”

“Yes, but also, no, I don’t think we’ll be staying that long.”  Tony isn’t eating anything himself — instead he has a stemless glass of wine cradled in his free hand.

Steve takes a bite of his sandwich.  It’s got the good spicy mustard on it; Tony knows what he likes.  “You want to tell me why I’m keeping you company tonight?”

“It’s a secret,” Tony says, taking a long drink of wine, his mouth curling against the edge of the glass.

The party is in the second floor of a building that puts the Avengers mansion to shame.  It’s filled with the gentle clink of glasses and a faint haze of cigar smoke.  Catering staff drift through, carrying platters of steaming, bite-sized morsels.  Steve counts three bars handing out liquor.

Tony cuts through the crowd, Steve drifting behind him.  He doesn’t stop until he has a glass of champagne in his hand, and gives one to Steve as well.  “You nurse this,” he instructs, and knocks back half of his flute in one go.

Tony smiles, and smiles, and smiles.

Steve holds the stem of his glass carefully and keeps his back straight.

“Tony!” a man calls.  He’s dressed in conservative black and white, with an American flag pin at his lapel.  Steve takes an instant dislike to him, and glances to Tony to see how he reacts.  Tony’s smile has turned darkly glad, and Steve watches him shift his weight onto one hip, even more dangerous and fey than usual.

“Steele,” Tony says smoothly, ignoring the man’s hand in favor of an air kiss to either side of his face, getting into the man’s space without touching him.  “Here alone, old friend?  Tired of supermodels already?”

Steve feels positively invisible.  Tony doesn’t make any effort to introduce him.

“The ex-wife is getting on my case.  Hag.”

“Good, good, I was hoping to catch you by yourself,” Tony says.  Steve narrows his eyes, aware that Tony’s orchestrating some kind of set up but not quite sure what it is yet.

Steele laughs deep in his chest.  “Don’t try to pull any gay shit on me, now,” he says, like it’s a good old joke.  From the way Tony stiffens, it’s not.

“Business, not pleasure,” Tony says, and if Steve didn’t know him so well he’d think it was good-natured.  “I heard you’re back in the rare earth metals business.  Ytterbium, really?”

“Well…” Steele says.  “I’m dabbling.  Are you back in the weapons business, Stark?”

“No,” Tony says.  There’s a pregnant pause.  “Not officially,” he amends.  “Certainly not in public.”

Steele nods like this makes perfect sense.  “There’s a lovely cigar lounge down the hall,” he murmurs.

Tony doesn’t tell Steve to hang back, so he follows the pair of out of the main room and into a quieter hallway.  The actual purpose of this party starts to become clear to Steve — it’s a place for backroom deals, just like what Tony is poised to make now.  But Tony isn’t planning on getting back into weapons.  Something else is up.

Steele lets them into the lounge.  Tony surreptitiously locks the door behind him, then wanders into the center of the room, picking up a cedar box of cigars from a low table and opening it to take a sniff.

“How about in private?” Steele asks, continuing their earlier conversation.  “And who’s this?  New business _partner?_ ”  Steve goes from feeling invisible to feeling like eyes are crawling up his skin.

Tony smiles, all teeth.  “Steve, darling, come over here and smell this.  It’s lovely.”  He selects a cigar from the box and offers it to Steve, who takes it obligingly.  It has a powerful, expensive aroma.  “Now hold that out for me,” Tony says, and picks up a cigar cutter from the table.

Steele begins to look concerned.  “What’s all this, Tony?  Why’d you bring muscle?”

Tony presses the blade against the end of the cigar, slowly slicing into it.  “Who’s your new client, Steele?” he asks.

“The usual,” Steele says, spreading his hands.  “A few defense contracts, some biotech firm interested in imaging technology.”

“No,” Tony says, still holding the cigar cutter.  “Wrong answer.”

“I can’t just divulge my client list to you,” Steele protests.

“Mmm,” Tony says.  “I don’t think I introduced you to Steve, did I?  Steve, this is Simon Steele.  Simon, this is Steve Rogers, aka Captain America.  There.  All familiar now.  Now, would you like to tell the good Captain why you’re selling rare metals to Victor von Doom, or shall I?”

Steve clenches his teeth, suddenly rigid with fury, but Tony just grins, takes the cigar and the champagne flute from Steve, and retreats to learn against the door.

“Talk,” Steve grits out.

“I didn’t know, how could I have known, shell companies within shell companies, honestly,” Steele says.

“He’s lying, Steve,” Tony says lightly.  Steve’s hands curl into fists.

“Money is money,” Steels says, holding up his hands in front of his face, as if he can block Steve.  Without consciously deciding to, Steve has closed on Steele, and the man is backing up, pressing himself like a coward again a glassed-in bookshelf.  “If I didn’t sell it to him, someone else would have.”

“There’s not very many people mining the things you pull out of the ground,” Tony interrupts.  “I think if you backed out it’d take Doom a good long time to source new materials for those delightful robots he’s been making.”

“You’re going to terminate that contract,” Steve growls in Steele’s face.

Steele cowers, saying nothing.

“You’re going to terminate it, _now_ ,” Steve says, and in a quick motion he punches out the glass beside Steele’s head.  A few shards of glass land in the man’s hair as he shrinks away, scrambling farther into the corner of the room.  He looks _afraid_.  That’s good.

“I’ll pay for that,” Tony says placidly.  “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gotten drunk at a party and broken something.  Now, I think we’ll be going.”

With that, Tony turns on his heel, unlocks the door, and saunters out.  Steve treats Steele to one last venomous look, and follows.

***

“I want a double of whiskey, then another double of whiskey, and then I want my limousine,” Tony says as they walk back into the main ballroom.  He’s shaking, Steve realizes.  Tony must not have been as sure about how that would go as he appeared to be.

At the bar Tony orders two drinks and gives one to Steve.  “Don’t drink that,” he instructs.  “It’s mine, you’re just holding it for appearances.”

Steve wants to touch Tony to steady him, but it’s too public.  “That was really something,” he says instead.

“Well, thank you,” Tony says, glancing around, distracted, “although, the last time I did that and didn’t have you, it went — not ideally.  We need to be gone before Steele collects himself to come out here.  I don’t want him to ruin our exit.”

The air as they leave the party is cool and humid.  A limousine pulls up, street lights glittering across the glossy roof.  “Finally,” Tony says, and climbs in.  Steve looks at the crystal tumbler in his hand.  Tony sticks his head out the door.  “Come on, honeybunch.”

Apparently they are stealing glassware as well as breaking it.  Steve will mail the glasses back.  He can ask Pepper what the address is, and where to find a post office.  That decided, he slides into the limo next to Tony.  Tony’s got his head tipped back against the seat, eyes closed, lashes dusky against his cheeks.  Without looking, Tony reaches up to his neck and pulls his bowtie loose, then undoes the first two buttons of his shirt one-handed.

Steve wants to press his face into the bare hollow of Tony’s throat.  He could kneel down in the car, between Tony’s already-spread knees, and unbutton the rest of Tony’s shirt, kiss down the hard lines of the chest plate that keeps Tony’s heart beating, click open the reactor panel so Tony’s face would be lit up gentle blue.  Steve could move his hand six inches, from the seat to the inside of Tony’s upper thigh, and Tony would finally _know_.

Tony clears his throat.  Steve looks up to meet Tony’s eyes, open, pupils wide in the dim light.  “This is a lot of mixed signals, even for you.”

“I —“ Steve says, unable to explain himself.  He plucks at his trousers to have something else to look at, straightening the braid at the sides.

“I can practically _hear_ you thinking about my dick.  What is it?  Morbid curiosity?  I’m a flaming bisexual, I do sex things you can hardly imagine, does that help?”

“No,” Steve says hoarsely.

“It’s a perfectly nice cock.  No complaints so far.”

Steve didn’t have any doubts about that.  He takes a drink from Tony’s whiskey, which he still has in his hand.  The alcohol won’t do anything, but the burn in his mouth feels appropriately bracing.

“Why don’t you touch me? Now we know about Rescue, you touch the rest of the team.  You — hugs, and handshakes and — not me,” Steve blurts.

Tony sighs.  “I have a lot of self-control, darling, but it’s not infinite.  It’s dangerous to get a taste of some things.”

“Self-control?” Steve says, dumbfounded.  Tony was holding himself back, that sounded like —

“You do know what you look like, right?” Tony asks dryly.  “However, contrary to popular belief, I do have a self-preservation instinct.  I don’t do straight guys, no matter how much I — I — actually, hm.”  Tony stops, abrupt, and Steve squeezes his hands around his own knees, because he knows what he wants Tony to say, and Tony isn’t going to say it.

Tony looks down into his drink like it’s betrayed him.  He tries to grin and it comes out wobbly.  “That was almost too much emotional openness, do you think it was too much?  It was too much.  Let’s go back and threaten some more mining contractors.  They give children mercury poisoning, did you know?”

Steve doesn’t know what to do with his face. He thinks his mouth is sagging open. “That’s horrible,” he says weakly.

“All those people are vile,” Tony says. His face twists, and he jerks his thumb backwards toward the party they’re leaving. “You know I used to buy palladium from Steele?  He has a lovely yacht. Pays his people in company credit. I always thought he had union organizers killed. Nothing that would ever stick in court, of course. Nothing worse than anyone else in that room did.”

Tony’s face is an ugly thing, dark with self-loathing. Steve reaches out, gently holds his hand. “You don’t do that anymore.”

“I used to.  I could again — I’m brilliant at it, and it makes me a lot of money. You don’t know how much I like money.”

“You like being a good person more,” Steve says firmly. 

“You don’t know,” Tony snarls. 

Steve shakes his head. “I know what you’re doing, Tony.  It’s not going to work. I’m not leaving.”

“You’re too good,” Tony says bitterly. “I’m going to ruin you.”

“Not that good,” Steve says, and kisses him.

Tony makes a surprised sound into Steve’s mouth, and then he’s dropping his drink on the seat and pulling on Steve’s jacket, yanking Steve closer.  He opens up under Steve, lets him deepen the kiss into a close, wet drag of lips.  Steve throws a leg over Tony’s hips and braces with one hand on the back of the seat, the other pressing in the center of Tony’s chest, metal rigid under his palm.

When Steve tries to pull back Tony follows him, nipping his lower lip, and Steve groans and presses back into him, groaning when Tony adds a little tongue.  Tony’s hands have slipped down to cup Steve’s ass, pulling their hips flush, obviously enjoying himself.

Steve lets Tony’s mouth go so he can rub his cheek against Tony’s and then bite his neck, just under the corner of his jaw.

“See, this?” Tony breathes into Steve’s ear, “this is not good for my self-control.”

“I don’t think I’m straight,” Steve replies, his heart feeling like it’s going to pound out of his chest.

Tony grabs him by the ears and they’re kissing again, deep and messy, and Steve feels amazing.  He feels like he could do anything.  “What do you like?” he asks Tony, breathless.

“Put your hands in my hair,” Tony says.  “Pull, a little, yes, like that.  And don’t stop kissing me.”

Steve could kiss Tony forever, he thinks.  Tony’s drink has spilled over in the seat next to them, and there’s liquor soaking into the knee of Steve’s pants, and he _doesn’t care_.  “Are you wearing lace underthings?”

“You don’t do a single thing by halves, do you?” Tony says wonderingly.

“But are you?” Steve asks, because he wants to _know_.

“Yes, always,” Tony says, and Steve shudders all over, fingers clenching in Tony’s hair.  “Black, tonight.”

Tony looks like a vision, shirt half-undone, lips kissed red, chest heaving a little against Steve’s.  Steve untangles one hand and hooks his fingers into Tony’s collar, pulling it open across his shoulder until he sees a strip of dark lace against Tony’s skin.

“Oh, fuck,” Steve says.

“I am going to do _unspeakable_ things to you,” Tony promises, sounding like he’s found God.  Steve doesn’t think God would approve mightily of Steve necking in the back of a limousine with a man, but he’s going to put off feeling guilty until later, when he isn’t so furiously hard.  Tony’s still talking.  Steve loves it, loves that he can stop Tony’s mouth with his own whenever he wants and then lean back and listen to Tony whisper urgently like the words are spilling out of him.  “You look so good, baby, so beautiful, we’re going to go slow so I can spend every second watching you.”

Steve has Tony’s shirt mostly open, working on touching him everywhere, when both of their phones buzz insistently at the same time.

“Shit fuck shit _goddamn_ , not right now!” Tony moans, throwing his head back.  Steve takes the opportunity to lay an open-mouthed kiss at the top of Tony’s sternum.  Tony picks up his phone and squints at it balefully.  “Robots, Steve, we have to do robots,”  Tony says, nudging him away.

Steve whines into Tony’s chest, but Tony keeps nudging him.  Reluctantly, Steve grabs his phone as well, skimming the Avengers alerts.  “I really don’t like Doctor Doom right now,” he says.

“Likewise,” Tony grumbles, re-doing his buttons and tucking his shirttails back in.  Then he laughs.  “You look positively debauched, darling.”

Steve blushes, self-conscious.  “So do you,” he says.

“Less novelty factor on me,” Tony says, reaching out to straighten Steve’s jacket.  “Let’s go fight some bad guys, darling, and we can pick this back up in the afterglow.”

***

They arrive at the fight just as the last of the doombots come through and the glow of the portals winks out.  They haven’t had this fight in the dark before, so that’s novel.  Steve can only see where the other Avengers are by tracking muzzle flashes and the bright lightning strikes of Thor’s hammer.  The doombots have eyeshine like cats or deer, occasional flashes of red reflecting out of dark alleys.

Rescue puts Steve down and plants herself at his six, doing something complex with the armor that emits a loud whine.  “It’s not supposed to make that noise,” Rescue grouches.  “This is what happens when I work on a deadline.”

One of the robots aims something sleek and long-barreled at them, and Steve doesn’t wait to find out if it’s a laser gun or something that shoots bullets before he hurls the shield at it.

Behind him, Rescue makes a grunt of satisfaction, and then a narrow beam of green light shoots from her gauntlet.  The robot nearest to them _melts_.  “What?” Steve says, so surprised he barely catches his shield on the ricochet.

Rescue takes off and zaps another doombot.  “Hey, it works!  Don’t sound so shocked; I did get a few things done before getting shellacked in that chemical plant.  Namely, doping Doom’s special metal alloy with nano machines.”

“You could have said!” Steve yells, slinging his shield at another bot.  It goes down with a loud bong.

“Didn’t want to get your hopes up, love,” Rescue says.  “It’s experimental!”

Steve gets on the team comms to let everyone know that Rescue has a more efficient doombot-killing technique than blunt force trauma, and their strategy streamlines into a simple assembly line.  Steve and Thor funnel the bots into a bottleneck, sending them one by one to Rescue, who turns them into sludge.  Clint spots from above, calling out escapers, and Natasha herds back the strays.

It works brilliantly; there’s minimal damage to nearby buildings, and Steve’s almost having fun, even when the doombots try to assemble into a mega-bot and snatch Rescue out of the air.  She dodges them and melts the central bot with ease.

The hardest part, honestly, is trying to figure out what to do with the leftover robot sludge.  “Should that be going into the storm drains?” Steve asks, looking worriedly at the little yellow fish that says _Rainwater Only!_

“It’s not like the sewers under New York can get _worse_ ,” Clint says.  “Have you seen the stuff Spiderman pulls out of there on the regular?”

“Let’s get some sandbags,” Steve sighs.

The problem with laying down sandbags is that it’s simple, mindless work, and Steve has time to _think_.  About kissing Tony again, mostly.  He has to face the reality of it now, not just the hypothetical.  If Tony wants to have him, then Steve’s last barrier between himself and — what had Tony called it, bisexual? — was gone.  No taking it back.  He’d have slept with a man, forever, with _Tony_ ; half of him is a live wire of panic while the other half sings with wanting it.

Rescue lands next to Steve and hands him a fresh stack of sandbags.  Steve lifts them onto his shoulder with a grunt of effort, and starts laying them one-handed along the edge of a puddled doombot.  

“You said there wouldn’t be another set of these,” Steve reminds Rescue, thinking back to the press conference.

“This hardly counts,” she says, lifting one booted foot and shaking it in annoyance.  Steve looks and finds she’s stepped in the metallic sludge.  “Oh, yuck.  This is going to wreck my paint job.”

“You said no more doombots, and here we are, up to our ankles in doombots,” Steve says.

Underneath the helmet, Steve suspects Tony is rolling his eyes.  “Who came up with light-activated robot-melting technology, huh?  Anyway, this is definitely the last batch, now that Steele’s shitting his pants.  Margin of error plus or minus one, not bad.”

Steve makes a skeptical noise, but underneath he’s proud.  The team did good.  And as soon as he gets done, Tony will be waiting for him.  As long as he hasn’t changed his mind.  Tony seemed pretty into it in the back of the limousine, but if Steve has time to think about Tony, Tony has time to think about Steve.  Maybe he’ll decide that Steve is too old-fashioned, too much trouble.

He tries to play it out in his head — how it’ll go when they get back.  Steve doesn’t know where he’ll find the courage to start again, after they’ve fought and changed into proper clothes and showered.  The most brilliant tactical mind of the century, stymied trying to get kissed again.  That’s a real kick in the pants.

He’ll just put it out of his mind for the present and improvise.  Steve focuses on the lift and burn of placing sandbags, and tries not to stare at Rescue more than normal.

***

Steve smooths his bedspread and wonders if he should just go to bed.  It’s late; they had _started_ fighting robots past ten, and by now it has to be at least two in the morning.  Tony needs more sleep than Steve; he’s probably tired, and Steve doesn’t even know where to find him.  He has a sudden, absurd impulse to pull up the Avengers location app and look for Tony’s dot, even though he knows it won’t give him fine enough detail to see anything about Tony’s whereabouts beyond “probably in the mansion.”

He’s saved by a soft knock on the door.  “It’s unlocked,” Steve calls.

Tony pushes the door open with just his fingertips, quiet on well-oiled hinges.  Tony probably hires someone specifically to make sure his doors open smoothly.

“Hey there,” Tony says, very gently.  He looks an awful lot like he did when Steve first met him; barefoot, crisp black slacks, white button down shirt, mussed hair, winking cut-crystal glass in one hand, tilting a half-inch of whiskey back and forth.  This time, however, Steve feels desperately fond.

“Tony,” Steve says, and his voice is lower than he expected.

“Usually, I run away from this part,” Tony says with a harsh little laugh.  “I’m not good at selfless.  But I thought — you’ll bottle it all up inside if you get a chance, I _know_ it, and that’s bad for you — so here I am.  To tell you, um, that there’s no pressure.  You don’t owe me anything.”

“Did I do something wrong?” Steve asks, gutted and confused.  He doesn’t understand why Tony came here to, what, let him down easy?  Tony isn’t making sense.

“No, absolutely not, darling, you’re fine.  You’re amazing.” Tony sighs and leans on the doorframe.

“Then I don’t understand,” Steve says.  He fists his hands in the bedspread, paralyzed by the way Tony won’t come any closer.

“Honey, you look terrified,” Tony says, raising his eyebrow like that explains everything.

“I’m not!” Steve says.

Tony takes a drink like it’ll solve something for him.  “You are spectacularly lacking in self-awareness at times.”

Steve scowls.  He doesn’t want Tony to insult him, he wants Tony to kiss him again.  Maybe he should say that.  “If you don’t want me, just say it and don’t pussyfoot around,” Steve says.  That didn’t come out exactly how he’d meant it to.

Tony’s mouth falls open and then he laughs again, pressing his glass to his forehead and shutting his eyes.  “I am so much better at this when I don’t care about the person I’m trying to sleep with, I swear,” he says, almost to himself.  Steve’s hearing is sharper than average; people forget.

“Let me try again,” Tony says.  “I want you to be comfortable.  You’re freaking out, and I assumed it was a sexuality crisis, because, you know, Captain America kissing a man, not exactly in line with the whole image, now you’ve had time to think, but now I think I might have been wrong.”

“Mostly I wasn’t sure if you wanted to kiss me again,” Steve says.

“Oh.  Right.  Yes.  The answer to that is yes, definitely, I think about that basically constantly, because it’s a free country, right?  Can’t arrest me for fantasies.”

Steve waits impatiently for Tony to get it out of his system.  Tony talks himself through most things in his life, and sometimes there isn’t anything to do but be patient while he catches up.  Steve wishes he had Tony in bed already so he could slow down that too-smart brain of his.

“ _Oh,_ ” Tony says again, and this time he sounds like Steve’s punched all the air out of him.  He’s gotten there.

Steve leans forward, supporting himself with one elbow on his knee, and watches as Tony puts his glass down, carefully, on the floor.  Steve’s heart is pounding in his chest, and maybe Tony’s right — maybe he is a little scared.

Tony advances on him, feet soft on the hardwood floor.  His clever fingers rise to his throat, undoing the buttons there.  His eyes are dark and intense.  “If I start to do something you don’t like, you tell me.  I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I think, um,” Steve says, “I think I’m going to like it.  Plus, I’m hard to break these days.”

“Yeah you are, stud,” Tony says, voice rough, and then he’s there, standing between Steve’s knees.  Steve looks up at him and licks his lips.

Tony runs one hand across Steve’s broad shoulders, skimming up his neck to stop and cradle Steve jaw.  Tony touches him like he’s something expensive, something well-made and worth the price.  Tony’s thumb ghosts across Steve’s lower lip, sending tingles all the way down Steve’s chest.  Then he does the same thing over the bow of Steve’s upper lip while Steve holds shivery-still underneath him.

Steve reaches out and gets one hand on Tony’s stomach, slipping two fingers between the buttons to touch Tony’s warm, bare skin.  He feels underdressed in comparison to Tony, just wearing soft grey sweatpants and a thin under-tank, but he can even that score.  It’s easy to pull his shirttails free, but then Tony bends in and kisses him and Steve is too distracted to do anything.

Tony keeps a gentle grip on Steve’s jaw as he kisses, starting soft and quickly getting more intense until Steve is panting for it.  He feels wet and taken, and Tony is _good_ at this, easy and practiced and pleased.  Whatever comes next is going to be amazing, Steve thinks fuzzily.

When Tony takes a moment to stop and stare happily into Steve’s face, Steve gets back to unbuttoning Tony’s shirt.  He starts at the top, his knuckles brushing the hard breastplate, and works his way down until Tony’s shirt is hanging open and Steve’s hands are resting on Tony’s hips.  He swallows and thumbs at Tony’s fly.

“Hey, hey,” Tony says, “slow, okay?”  Steve frowns.  He can tell even through Tony’s pants that he’s quickly getting hard.

“You don’t —” Steve asks.  He thought Tony wanted him.  All evidence certainly points that way.

“Oh, no, I do,” Tony says breathlessly, “but you’re not even out of your clothes yet, darling.”

Tony shrugs the rest of the way out of his shirt, revealing red metal, golden skin, and black lace.  Steve pulls off his own tank top, grabbing it by the back of the neck and pulling it over his head as quick as he can.

“That’s lovely,” Tony says, eyeing him up and down.  “Lean back a little, let me look.”

Steve blushes but does what Tony asks, settling back on his elbows.  He flexes a little, rolling his hips.  The new posture presses his cock up against his sweatpants and it’s embarrassingly hard, leaking already at the tip.

Tony groans and drops a hand to palm himself through his pants.  “I thought you were going slow,” Steve teases.

“Shut up,” Tony says, rubbing himself one more time before taking his hand away and tapping Steve’s knee.  “Let’s get these off, then.”

Steve hitches his hips up obligingly and Tony yanks his pants down.  “No underwear?  _Baby,_ ” Tony breathes, like Steve’s a delightful present.

“Well, I,” Steve tries to explain, but Tony shushes him and crawls up onto the bed, pushing Steve flat on his back and kissing him again, his tongue in Steve’s mouth and his metal breastplate cold against Steve’s chest.  Steve’s nipples tighten up against the chill, and he flushes.  Tony notices and smiles wickedly.  

When Tony’s nails scratch gently over his nipple Steve makes a stuttering noise and presses into Tony’s hand.  “You just go pink all over, amazing,” Tony says, and does it again.

“You could take _your_ pants off,” Steve grouches.

“Sure, love, I can do that,” Tony says, and drops his hands to his fly.  Steve watches, tongue practically glued to the top of his mouth, as Tony undoes his pants and shimmies out of them.  Tony’s underwear is black and silky, edged with lace and tight over his hips.  Steve’s never seen a man wear anything like that.  

“Are those uncomfortable?” Steve asks despite himself.

“Well, not usually,” Tony says, “but maybe a little constricting right now.”

Steve reaches out to touch, brushing just his knuckles over the front of Tony’s underwear.  The sound that Tony makes is delicious.

“God, your hands are so big,” Tony breathes, pressing his hips forward.  His underwear is silky-smooth against Steve’s knuckles.  “I bet you could fill me right up with two fingers.”

Steve’s eyes widen.  

“Probably not tonight,” Tony says, then pouts speculatively.  “Unless you keep lube in that nightstand?”

Steve shakes his head — of course he doesn’t, he’s not _Tony_.  Then he realizes how ridiculous that thought is — he’s right here, _with_ Tony, and laughs.

Tony smiles, wide and blinding, like he’s delighted that Steve is happy enough to laugh in bed with him.  Steve pulls Tony down to kiss him again, and Tony doesn’t stop smiling, so Steve finds himself kissing teeth as much as he’s kissing lips.  It’s graceless, almost silly, but it makes Steve’s head swim with joy.

Then Tony’s hips fall against his, and Steve feels silk against his cock and it’s _amazing_ , he can’t help straining upwards, reaching for more of that sensation.

“I think simple is best, for starters,” Tony says, smiling into Steve’s face.  “And I’ve been wanting to suck your dick for ages.”

“Well,” Steve gasps, “when you put it like that, how can a fella say no?”

“Mmmmm,” Tony hums, biting gently at Steve’s neck, “guess you’ll have to say yes.”

Tony’s mouth on Steve is incredible, hot and wet.  Tony licks him all over, and wraps his hand around what doesn’t fit in his mouth.  

Steve hikes one leg over Tony’s shoulder, giving him more space to work, and rests his heel gently against Tony’s back.  Tony wraps his free arm around Steve’s thigh, pushing his hip into the mattress and holding him there.  Steve’s under Tony’s control and he just lies back and surrenders to the feeling, shutting his eyes and losing himself in the quick wet sounds of Tony’s mouth.

Tony doesn’t stop, even when Steve is twisting underneath him, needy and desperate.

“Tony, hey, I’m, _Tony_ ,” Steve babbles, pushing on Tony’s forehead because if he doesn’t let up now Steve’s going to come in his mouth.  Tony grabs Steve’s hand and pins it to the bed and doesn’t slow down.  Steve strains, trying not to be rude, trying to hold back, but then Tony sucks harder, curls his tongue around the bottom of Steve’s cock, and Steve lets go, jerking into Tony’s mouth, and Tony hums happily, swallowing.  He strokes up and down Steve’s stomach, gentle and grounding, as Steve shudders through the aftershocks, chest heaving.

Finally Tony pulls off, licks his wet lips, and presses a gentle kiss into the crease of Steve’s thigh.  Steve lies limply on the bed, spent and useless.

Tony slides up next to him, pillows his head on Steve’s shoulder and rests one hand on Steve’s chest.  He’s soft and sweet like that, even though Steve can feel that he’s still hard, pressed up against Steve’s hip.

“I’m — ah — give me a minute,” Steve says weakly.

“As long as you need, darling,” Tony says.  “I’m perfectly happy right here.”

Steve bends and kisses the top of Tony’s head, finding the energy to curl one hand around Tony’s back and hold him close.  Everywhere Tony touches is alight with sensation, even through Steve’s post-orgasm haze.

He loses some time then, running his fingers lazily up and down Tony’s lower back, drifting in satisfaction.  Eventually the tug of arousal brings him back, and he presses gently on Tony’s shoulder, rolling him onto his back.  He pushes one thigh between Tony’s — they fall open willingly for him — and grinds down.  Tony’s eyes flutter shut, beatific, so Steve does it again.

Steve kisses Tony’s jaw, his neck, his strong shoulders, his clavicle.  Then he draws down the bed, dropping a kiss on the center of Tony’s arc reactor as he goes, to lick open-mouthed and wet down Tony’s stomach.

“I want to put my mouth on you,” Steve says, and Tony nods frantically, thumbs already hooking his underwear down.

Steve covers Tony’s hands with his own, stopping him.  “With them on at first?” he asks.

Tony throws his head back and moans, bringing his hands up to cover his eyes.  “You’re a monster, Steve.  A sex monster.”

Steve bends down and presses a kiss onto the place where the head of Tony’s cock presses against the fabric.  Then he licks it, enjoying the novel texture.  Tony makes a choking whine like Steve is torturing him.

Steve rubs a calming hand up and down Tony’s thigh.  “Hey, I’ve got you.”

“You know,” Tony says from behind his hands, “I thought I was going to be the one reassuring you this whole time.”

“I’m very unflappable,” Steve deadpans, and then presses his mouth, open and wet, over Tony’s covered dick.

Tony swears in a quiet, filthy stream as Steve mouthes gently at him.  His hands find their way onto Steve’s head, not pushing, just stroking through his hair and scratching gently at his scalp.

Eventually Steve takes pity on him and pulls his underwear down, freeing his dick.  It bounces against his stomach, wet at the tip.  Steve delicately drags one finger along it from base to tip, circling carefully around the head.

“I’m not going to be as good at this as you.”

“Anything you do, I’ll love it,” Tony reassures him.  “Well, don’t bite.”

“I wasn’t planning on using my _teeth_ ,” Steve says, and wraps his lips around Tony’s cock.

“Wow, fuck, that’s nice,” Tony groans immediately.  “I hope you didn’t think wouldn’t talk through this, because this is basically all of my top ten dirty fantasies coming true at once and I’m not great at quiet.  I have a lot of skills but silence isn’t one of them.”

Steve feels sloppy and awkward, but Tony keeps up a steady stream of fervent praise.  Some other time, Steve is going to do something to make Tony shut up in bed, but right now it’s nice, comforting, that Tony is still Tony, even during sex, and Steve is doing a good job.

Tony only stops the commentary when Steve can tell he’s close. He screws his eyes shut and gets quiet, his fingers flexing in Steve’s hair.  Steve isn’t quite sure about come in his mouth, but Tony anticipates that, and taps Steve on the shoulder right before.  Steve switches to his hand, working Tony spit-slick and quick, until he comes with a hoarse sigh.

Steve strokes him through it, and then pulls his hand away awkwardly, not quite sure what to do with the mess on it.

“Do you want me to lick that clean for you?” Tony asks dazedly.

Steve’s face goes fire-hot.  “No that’s, um, that’s okay.”

“If you’re sure,” Tony says, snuggling up against Steve’s pillows.  Steve grabs the corner of the sheet instead, wiping off Tony first and then himself.

Tony waves lazily at Steve.  “Come up here, baby.  Your legs are hanging off the bottom of the bed.”

Steve shuffles up until his head hits the pillows.  Tony rearranges him, lifting Steve’s limbs around like he owns them, until they’re cuddled together more comfortably than Steve thought was possible, Tony’s nose pressed into the back of Steve’s neck, his beard scratchy on Steve’s skin.

Steve thought he’d feel more different, now that he’s had sex with a man.  He’s supposed to be changed; he’s queer now.  Tony’s breath is warm on his shoulder, and it just feels nice.  

Natasha told him that Tony falls hard.  “He’s got two modes: one night stand and eternal devotion,” she’d said.  “It’s sort of exhausting to watch.”

Steve thinks — he’s almost certain — that Tony will want to do this again, maybe forever, maybe as long as Steve wants it, too.  Steve guesses he’ll find out if Tony’s still there in the morning.

He laces his fingers with Tony’s more firmly, then tucks their linked hands into his chest and kisses Tony’s knuckles.  Tony murmurs something sleepy and incoherent, and Steve shuts his eyes.

***

Rescue hovers one gauntleted finger over the credit card reader.  The pad of her finger glows blue, and then the reader chirps.  _Payment Approved!_

“The cashiers hate it when you do that,” Steve says in sotto voice.

Rescue takes their bagels and nods at the cashier.  “Not a lot of places to keep a billfold in this,” she says.  The light behind one of the eyes in the faceplate blinks on and off, and Steve realizes she’s _winking_.  The cashier blushes and adjusts her headscarf.

“I have a dress with that problem,” she says.  “But I make my date carry my things.”

Rescue laughs and elbows Steve in the side.  It hurts — the suit has hard edges.  “Hey Cap, how come you never offer your pockets to me?”

“They’re tactical pouches,” Steve grouches, which makes Rescue double over in raucous laughter.  The cashier laughs too, even though she covers her mouth with her hand to try to cover it.  Steve scowls; he didn’t mean to be funny.

“Thank you for the lovely baked goods, dear,” Rescue says, when she’s recovered, and steers Steve out of the bakery.

Tony had stayed, that first night, and stayed true to form, tipping directly into overwhelming attentiveness.  It was a little scary, how much Tony could care, but Steve liked it.  The first thing he’d done was drag Steve into the workshop to finish the harness design so Steve could fly with Rescue.  Of course, Tony had insisted that Steve take his shirt off to get the best fit, and when Steve refused Tony kissed him, hot and deep, until Steve’s shirt came off anyway.

They’d gotten to test it out this morning, pulling people out of the top floor of a biochemistry lab that had exploded.  Rescue had kept up a color commentary in Steve’s ear the entire time.  “See, graduate students, this is why you wear safety equipment when you’re working with a hydrogen atmosphere,” she chided.  When Steve noted that she didn’t wear safety goggles, _ever_ , Rescue laughed and said that only people who make mistakes have to wear personal protective equipment.

After, Rescue had insisted on splitting off from the team to get bagels for Steve, saying he gets cranky if he doesn’t eat.  He’s not cranky, he’s fine, just a little hungry.

“Don’t flirt with girls at the register,” Steve scolds.  “They’re working, it’s rude.”

“Oh, Steve, honey, don’t worry,” Rescue says.  “She absolutely pegged us as a couple.  And she thinks you’re a bad boyfriend!  I love her, we have to go back to that place.”

Steve has a moment of reflexive panic — if anyone sees they’re a couple then they’ll know Steve’s not straight, and he’s not ready for that, he can’t — and then he remembers that everyone is seeing Rescue, not Tony.  And Rescue is a woman.

There’s no reason Rescue and Captain America can’t date.  If she wants to.  Steve thinks he’d like that.

Rescue leads them to a tiny park tucked between two streets.  There’s a statue in the middle with concrete steps around it; the perfect place for Rescue to sit without worrying that she’d break anything.

Steve digs his bagel out of the paper bag and tucks in.  He goes over the mission with Rescue as he eats, answering all her questions about kinks in how the harness worked for him, the best vectors for landing and takeoff, what could be optimized.

Watching Rescue sketch things out with her hands, explaining electromagnets to Steve, again, because she wants him to care about the technical minutiae, _especially if it’s keeping you alive, darling, it’s important,_ Steve feels suffused with warmth.

So he reaches over, catches the sides of Rescue’s helmet with both hands, and kisses her on the faceplate.  Rescue goes perfectly still, and then she puts one heavy armored hand around the back of his neck, holding him close.  “This is very public,” she says carefully.

Steve leans their foreheads together.  “I’m not ready to be out yet,” he admits.  “It’s cowardly, I know, I know you —“

“Hey, Cap, hush.  I can be out about men, but you don’t have to be.  Not yet.  I’m not ready to be out as Rescue either, and that’s — that’s gotta be okay.”

“As Rescue, though, I wouldn’t — you wouldn’t —“ Steve can’t quite get it out.

Rescue rubs one metal thumb up and down along Steve’s neck, tickling the short hairs there.  “It’d mean if I get outed to the public, you would too.”

“I can handle that,” Steve says, because he thinks he can.  It’d be hard, but he’s Captain America.  If Captain America is sleeping with — in a relationship with — maybe, soon, in love with — a man, well, America will endure that.  The country can change.  Steve’s seen that first hand.

Rescue bends to whisper in Steve’s ear.  “Hey, hey, Steve.  Touch my boob.”

“No!”

“You’ll suck my cock but not touch my fantastically expensive metal boob?” Rescue asks, all mock-affront.  Steve knows that behind the mask, she’s smiling.

“That’s different!  We’re in public!”

“Classy man, I like it.”

Steve grins and kisses her metal face again.  “What can I say, I’m old-fashioned.”

Rescue turns her head a little.  “Don’t look now, but there’s at least six people taking photos on their phones.”

“Let them,” Steve says.  “It’ll be good for your reputation.”

“My reputation as Rescue is spotless!”

“Hmmmm,” Steve hums, skeptical.  He reads the papers.  At least half of them speculate that she’s sleeping with her employer, the incorrigible rake and known asshole, Tony Stark.

Rescue snorts and pushes Steve away.  “Clip in, big man, we’re going home.  And then maybe you can touch my boob in private.”

Steve stands and settles his arms over Rescue’s shoulders, letting her snap the safety harness into place, snug and secure.  Then, with a roar of acceleration, they’re soaring.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Additional content warnings: Canon-typical violence. One scene of extreme claustrophobia and subsequent panic attacks. Tony drinks but doesn't spend time drunk.
> 
> Steve forcibly outs Tony as Rescue, and then takes it poorly. There’s a fair amount of homophobia and transphobia, largely coming from Steve. Tony doesn’t identify as trans or genderqueer, but Rescue is a woman and is a significant part of his identity, and Steve misgenders her occasionally early in the story.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [the face and the mask are mirrors, baby (the genderqueer remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17781824) by [runningondreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/runningondreams/pseuds/runningondreams)




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